Think Cuba, you’re likely to think bearded revolutionaries in fatigues. Salsa. Sugar cane. Rock ‘n’ roll, zombies, drugs – anomie and angst – do not generally figure in our mental images of a country that’s assumed an outsized place in the American imagination. But fresh from the tropics, in Cuba in Splinters – a sparkling package of stories we’re assured are fictional – that’s exactly what you’ll find. Eleven writers largely unknown outside Cuba depict a world that veers from a hyperreal Havana in decay, against a backdrop of oblivious drug-toting German tourists, to a fantasy land – or is it? – where vigilant Cubans bar the door to zombies masquerading as health inspectors. Sex and knife-fights, stutterers and addicts, losers and lost literary classics: welcome to a raw and genuine island universe closed to casual visitors.
This delightful anthology offers us a rare glimpse into a less known aspect of Ismat Chughtai's writing – the warmth, humour and affection with which she writes on childhood. Shedding al...
We, the Rejected People of India is an anthology of Marathi Dalit poems in which a dilemma of being a Dalit in the elite spaces is very much visible. Read them, and you will have a differe...
Sumanta Banerjee places his collection of Naxalite poems and songs, both urban and rural, in a fairly elaborate theoretical matrix that gives a short account of the Revolt through its various phases, ...
Khwaja Ahmad Abbas distinguished himself by his ceaseless passion for revolutionary politics, which he expressed through his writings and films. He was a visionary who strongly believed that creati...
Set in turbulent post-Partition Bengal, Sabitri Roy's epic novel Bawdwip, translated into English for the first time, tells a story of a community which, uprooted ruthlessly from its homeland, fights ...
Kapal-kundala, also known as 'Mrinmoyee', is a Bengali romance novel by Indian writer Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay. Published in 1866, it is a story of a forest-dwelling girl named Kapalku...
What makes a work of literature good or bad? How freely can the reader interpret it? Could a nursery rhyme like 'Baa Baa Black Sheep' be full of concealed loathing, resentment and aggression? Eagleton...
Award-winning novelist Randa Jarrar’s new story collection moves seamlessly between realism and fable, history and the present, capturing the lives of Muslim women and men across myriad geographi...
Days Will Come Back is probably the first Punjabi Dalit poetry collection which has been translated into English. Poems in it are simmering with the smell of revolution that the soil of Pu...
Virginia Woolf once described modernist fiction as “a thing you could ruffle with your breath, and a thing you could not dislodge with a team of horses”. That precisely captures R. Chudamani’...