2019 was special for us at LeftWord Books. We turned 20 this year. Even the bookstore – May Day – is 6 years old now.
'There was barely place to stand!' is what we reported last year. But we broke our own record this year, with over 800 of you joining our May Day celebrations.
Amidst all the books, coffee, pastries and music, we went around asking you questions. Hope that didn't bother much. We were only trying to survey who was visiting us. The total number who agreed to take the survey w[...]
On a warm evening in 1972, when I was five years old and living in a village by the sea—Puthenthope in Thiruvananthapuram—I accompanied my cousin to our village library. The librarian gave me a nice smile and took me to the old wooden shelves where the children's books were stacked. As I quickly glanced through them my eyes rested on an oddly shaped book—Vaalameen Chirikkunnu (The Vaala Fish Laughs). The book was the Malayalam translation of a Soviet folktale, fabulously illustrated and pr[...]
Marie Kondo, the Japanese television star of Tiding Up with Marie Kondo (Netflix), wrote in her book The Changing Magic of Tidying Up – ‘I now keep my collection of books to about thirty volumes at any one time’. The phrase was misquoted on social media, as if she had implied that one should only have thirty books. That was not what she wrote. But it got us thinking: what are the thirty books that have most influenced us?There’s the perennial ‘desert island’ challenge. What is the on[...]
2019 is almost here. As 2018 comes to an end, we look back at the year gone by. At LeftWord Books, we published 10 new titles. You can read about our books in 2018 here. This is also the time when people come up with their lists of 'best or worst' things in a year. We followed the trend and asked people in our staff to name their three favorite books from the ones that they read in 2018. Although, the ground rules in other lists emphasize that books in the list must be published in the year they[...]