The Hippo Girl and Other Stories
Written in lucid prose and engulfed in intense emotions, The Hippo Girl and Other Stories is a searingly honest collection about what it is to be human in a world where rage, violence, grief, and obsession are part of everyday life. Set in Bangladesh, each of these atmospheric stories digs deep and paints a complex and rich picture of people’s journey towards happiness.
Sanskrit has too often been regarded as the sacred language of the gods, yet it is love that has been the overwhelming obsession of Sanskrit writers for over 3,000 years. How to Love in Sanskrit is an invitation to Sanskrit love poetry, bringing together verses and short prose pieces by celebrated writers like Kalidasa and Banabhatta, Buddhist and Jain monks, scholars, emperors, and even some modern-day poets.
When the owner of the bookshop above Chikkamma Tours gets stabbed to death in the building, grumpy, book-obsessed, wise-cracking Nilima jumps at the opportunity to play amateur detective. With help from her boss Shwetha, whom she has a crush on, and Inspector Lamani, who is Nilima’s ex-girlfriend’s current girlfriend, Nilima investigates the murder, facing down angry bookshop employees, gangsters and sundry shady characters.
Knife: Meditations after an Attempted Murder
On the morning of August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie was standing onstage at the Chautauqua Institution, preparing to give a lecture on the importance of keeping writers safe from harm, when a man wearing black clothes and a black mask rushed down the aisle toward him, wielding a knife. Knife is Rushdie at the peak of his powers, writing with urgency, with gravity, with unflinching honesty. It is also a deeply moving reminder of literature’s capacity to make sense of the unthinkable, an intimate and life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, art—and finding the strength to stand up again.
In This Land We Call Home, Nusrat F. Jafri traces the roots of her nomadic forebears, who belonged to one such ‘criminal’ tribe, the Bhantus from Rajasthan. This affecting memoir explores religious and multicultural identities and delves into the profound concepts of nation-building and belonging. Nusrat’s family found acceptance in the church, alongside a sense of community, theology, songs and carnivals, and quality education for the children in missionary schools.
Prem is a recently married teacher who is neither very good at teaching nor at being married. He is promised an ally against his wife Indu, whom he regards with varying degrees of irritation, when his mother comes to visit. He soon finds, though, that maternal interference is far from helpful, and he receives comfort from an entirely unexpected quarter – his wife – as he discovers through her the joys of being a ‘settled husband and householder’.
Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries
Through a captivating collection of ‘postcards’ from the outskirts of India (and further afield—Europe, America, and the Middle East), Provincials immerses us in the imaginative realm of those who revel in their provinciality. Delving into the lives and works of Rabindranath Tagore, the Bhakti poets, Kishore Kumar, William Shakespeare, John Clare, T. S. Eliot, J. M. Coetzee, V. S. Naipaul, the Brontës, Annie Ernaux, and others, she celebrates the wit, mirth, whimsy, and irony of small-town lives and living.
A grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone she’s lost. A professor develops a troubled intimacy with her hairdresser. And every year, a restless woman receives an email from a strange man twice her age and several states away. In Yiyun Li’s stories, people strive for an ordinary existence until doing so becomes unsustainable, until the surface cracks and grand mysterious forces – death, violence, estrangement – come to light.
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