FROM THE BEST-SELLING AUTHOR OF MY SEDITIOUS HEART AND THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS, A NEW AND PRESSING DISPATCH FROM THE HEART OF THE CROWD AND THE SOLITUDE OF A WRITER’S DESK
Azadi-Urdu for Freedom-is the refrain in the iconic chant of the Kashmiri freedom struggle. And now, while Kashmir’s streets have been silenced, the irony is that its people’s anthem, with similar lyrics, rhythm and cadence, echoes on the streets of the country that most Kashmiris view as their coloniser. What lies between the silence of one street and the sound of the other? Is it a chasm, or could it become a bridge?
In this series of penetrating essays on politics and literature, Arundhati Roy examines this question and challenges us to reflect on the meaning of freedom in a world of growing authoritarianism.
Roy writes of the existential threat posed to Indian democracy by an emboldened Hindu nationalism, of the internet shutdown and information siege in Kashmir-the most densely militarized zone in the world-and India’s new citizenship laws that discriminate against Muslims and marginalized communities and could create a crisis of statelessness on a scale previously unknown.
The essays include mediations on language, public as well as private, and the role of fiction and alternative imaginations in these disturbing times.
Azadi, she warns, hangs in the balance for us all.
Kapcsolódó könyvek
Salman Rushdie - Fury
Fury is the story of a dollmaker whose dolls run wild, of living women turned into dolls and then broken, and of a revolt on the planet's far side led by an army of living dolls. Fury is a novel of an old, deep love gone wrong, of a second, twisted passion rooted in wrongness, and of a third, passionate love that just might turn out right. Fury is a novel of furious energy, a study of the workings of fury at the heart of human lives: the personal fury that poisons human relations, the psychotic fury that fuels murderers, the social fury born of our raised and disappointed hopes, the creative fury that sets free our greatest gifts, the political fury that starts revolutions and burns whole cities down. Fury is a novel of today, an utterly contemporary portrait of life at the beginning of the third millennium, life in New York during an apparently endless time of prosperity that is paradoxically also a time of barrenness in many people's lives, and also in the world-empire that America rules, although it barely knows where it is.
Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy
A student, a shoemaker, a poet: three suitors fight for Lata. Meanwhile India, newly-independent, is struggling through a time of great turmoil as the agony of partition still throbs in people's minds - driving a wedge through friendships. families, political unions. Now at the beginning of a new era, the country faces its first general election, and the sixth of the world's population faces its chance to map its own destiny.
A shadow of doubt has fallen over Lata's first suitor, the second quietly presses his case, the third dreams of her 'in his head' but still looks for courage. Fortunately, Mrs Rupa Mehra's attentions are diverted by the birth of Savita's baby and augury surely of a happy ending.
Salman Rushdie - Joseph Anton (angol)
On February 14, 1989, Valentine’s Day, Salman Rushdie received a telephone call from a BBC journalist who told the author that he had been “sentenced to death” by the Ayatollah Khomeini. It was the first time Rushdie heard the word fatwa. His crime? To have written a novel called The Satanic Verses, which was accused of being “against Islam, the Prophet, and the Quran.”
So begins the extraordinary story of how a writer was forced underground, moving from house to house, with the constant presence of an armed police protection team. Rushdie was asked to choose an alias that the police could call him by. He thought of writers he loved and various combinations of their names. Then it came to him: Conrad and Chekhov—Joseph Anton.
How do a writer and his family live with the threat of murder for more than nine years? How does he go on working? How does he fall in and out of love? How does despair shape his thoughts and actions, and how does he learn to fight back? In this remarkable memoir, Rushdie tells that story for the first time; the story of the crucial battle for freedom of speech. He shares the sometimes grim, sometimes comic realities of living with armed policemen, and the close bonds he formed with his protectors; of his struggle for support and understanding from governments, intelligence chiefs, publishers, journalists, and fellow writers; and of how he regained his freedom.
Compelling, provocative, and moving, Joseph Anton is a book of exceptional frankness, honesty, and vital importance. Because what happened to Salman Rushdie was the first act of a drama that is still unfolding somewhere in the world every day.
Salman Rushdie - Shame
In this brilliant novel, Salman Rushdie masterfully combines history, art, language, politics, and religion. Set in a country "not quite Pakistan," the story centers around the families of two men-one a celebrated warrior, the other, a debauched playboy-engaged in a protracted duel that is played out in the political landscape of their country. Shame is a tour de force and a fitting predecessor to the author's legendary novel, The Satanic Verses.
Salman Rushdie - Imaginary Homelands
This collection of 75 of Salman Rushdie's candid personal essays--an informative companion to his fiction--provide a record of his thoughts on various aspects of our world: politics, religion, the lives and work of fellow writers (including an elegy for Raymond Carver), movies (one of Rushdie's passions), the experiences of immigration and exile, and his own books.
Gita Mehta - A River Sutra
A sequence of delicate, tragic stories evokes the profound presence of tradition and desire. A retired bureaucrat has escaped the world to run a guest-house on the banks of the country's holiest river, the Narmada. But too many lives converge here and he meets a series of unusual characters.
Ray Bradbury - Zen in the Art of Writing
"Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a land mine. The land mine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces back together. Now, it's your turn. Jump!" Zest. Gusto. Curiosity. These are the qualities every writer must have, as well as a spirit of adventure. In this exuberant book, the incomparable Ray Bradbury shares the wisdom, experience, and excitement of a lifetime of writing. Here are practical tips on the art of writing from a master of the craft-everything from finding original ideas to developing your own voice and style-as well as the inside story of Bradbury's own remarkable career as a prolific author of novels, stories, poems, films, and plays. _Zen In The Art Of Writing_ is more than just a how-to manual for the would-be writer: it is a celebration of the act of writing itself that will delight, impassion, and inspire the writer in you. In it, Bradbury encourages us to follow the unique path of our instincts and enthusiasms to the place where our inner genius dwells, and he shows that success as a writer depends on how well you know one subject: your own life.
Isaac Asimov - Robot Visions
From the writer whose name is synonymous with the science of robotics comes five decades of robot visions-36 landmark stories and essays, plus three rare tales-gathered together in one volume
Isaac Asimov - Gold
Gold is Isaac Asimov's first original collection of science fiction in over a decade. It is also his last science fiction collection, one containing all of his uncollected SF stories that have never before appeared in book form.
Gold is the final and crowning achievementof the fifty-five year career of science fiction's transcendent genius, the world-famous author who defined the field of SF for its practitioners, for its millions of readers, and for the world at large. The stories collected here for the first time range from the humorous to the profound, for Asimov was engaged until the end of his days in the work of redefining and expanding the boundaries of the literature he loved, and indeed, helped create. And there is more. For at the heart of this extraordinary compendium is the title story, "Gold," a moving and revealing drama about a writer who gambles everything on a chance at immortality-a gamble Asimov himself made. And won.
Dorothy L. Sayers - Sayers on Holmes
Sayers on Holmes collects the writings of Dorothy L. Sayers on the subject of Sherlock Holmes. In "Sherlock Holmes and His Influence," Sayers examines how the Sherlock Holmes stories affected the genre of detective fiction. In "The Dates in 'The Red-Headed League'" she discusses the contradictory dates in the Holmes story. In "Holmes' College Career" Sayers determines which university Holmes attended--Oxford or Cambridge--and speculates on a birth year for Holmes. "Dr. Watson's Christian Name" represents an effort by Sayers to solve the problem that Watson is called by different first names in different Holmesian stories. "Dr. Watson, Widower," is concerned with the speculation on Dr. Watson's possible multiple marriages. In addition, published here for the first time is the script she wrote for a radio production, "A Tribute to Sherlock Holmes on the Occasion of his 100th Birthday," in which the young Lord Peter Wimsey consults Sherlock Holmes.
Jhumpa Lahiri - The Namesake
'When her grandmother learned of Ashima's pregnancy, she was particularly thrilled at the prospect of naming the family's first sahib. And so Ashima and Ashoke have agreed to put off the decision of what to name the baby until a letter comes...'
For now, the label on his hospital cot reads simply BABY BOY GANGULI. But as time passes and still no letter arrives from India, American bureaucracy takes over and demands that the boy be given a name. In a panic, his father decides to nickname him 'Gogol' - after his favourite writer.
Brought up as an Indian in suburban America, Gogol Ganguli soon finds himself itching to cast off his awkward name, just as he longs to leave behind the inherited values of his Bengali parents. And so he sets off on his own path through life, a path strewn with conflicting loyalties, love and loss...
Spanning three decades and crossing continents, Jhumpa Lahiri's much-anticipated first novel is a triumph of humane storytelling. Elegant, subtle and moving, The Namesake is for everyone who loved the clarity, sympathy and grace of Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize-winning debut story collection, Interpreter of Maladies.
Aravind Adiga - The White Tiger
A brutal view of India's class struggles is cunningly presented in Adiga's debut about a racist, homicidal chauffer. Balram Halwai is from the Darkness, born where India's downtrodden and unlucky are destined to rot. Balram manages to escape his village and move to Delhi after being hired as a driver for a rich landlord. Telling his story in retrospect, the novel is a piecemeal correspondence from Balram to the premier of China, who is expected to visit India and whom Balram believes could learn a lesson or two about India's entrepreneurial underbelly. Adiga's existential and crude prose animates the battle between India's wealthy and poor as Balram suffers degrading treatment at the hands of his employers (or, more appropriately, masters). His personal fortunes and luck improve dramatically after he kills his boss and decamps for Bangalore. Balram is a clever and resourceful narrator with a witty and sarcastic edge that endears him to readers, even as he rails about corruption, allows himself to be defiled by his bosses, spews coarse invective and eventually profits from moral ambiguity and outright criminality. It's the perfect antidote to lyrical India.
Shashi Tharoor - The Great Indian Novel
The delightfully suspect and satirical tone of Tharoor's title informs and enlivens his monumental tale. In an opening disclaimer, the author cites the Mahabharata , an ancient Hindu epic, as the source of his inspiration. The story he retells, however, is also a thinly veiled account of the people and events that shaped India during the struggle for independence from British rule. Tharoor recasts these in a mythological, fictive realm, skillfully interweaving elements of traditional Eastern and Western literature. The epic, the sonnet, the novel and the folk tale all help to shape the narrative, just as history and myth, dream and reality intertwine in every chapter, calling into question the validity of categories. "One must be wary of history by anecdote," warns the narrator; one must be wary of "history" itself, suggests Tharoor. Despite his stereotypical treatment of British and Indian characters, he animates history with the imagination of an artist and the philosophy of a sage. Throughout, Tharoor appropriates titles, phrases and figures from the work of a pantheon of "first-world" writers, ranging from E. M. Forster and Rudyard Kipling to Ernest Hemingway and Arthur Koestler (and even including his contemporary Salman Rushdie) - a subtle but potent reversal of the traditional tide of cultural colonialism.
Nick Hornby - Housekeeping vs. the Dirt
In this latest collection of essays following The Polysyllabic Spree, critic and author Nick Hornby continues the feverish survey of his swollen bookshelves, offering a funny, intelligent, and unblinkered account of the stuff he's been reading. Ranging from the middlebrow to the highbrow (with unrepenting dips into the lowbrow), Hornby's dispatches from his nightstand table serve as useful guides to contemporary letters, with revelations on contemporary culture, the intellectual scene, and English football, in equal measure.
Nick Hornby - The Complete Polysyllabic Spree
The Polysyllabic Spree collects a year's worth of Hornby’s riotous and informative "Stuff I’ve Been Reading" columns from the Believer, in which Hornby lists the books he’s read, along with what he bought and may one day read. He ably explores everything from the classic to the graphic novel, as well as poems, plays, and sports-related exposés. And if he occasionally implores a biographer for brevity, or abandons a literary work in favor of an Arsenal soccer match, then all is not lost. His warm and riotous writing, full of all the joy and surprise and despair that books bring him, reveals why we still read, even when there's soccer on TV, a pram in the hall, and a good band playing at our local bar.
All proceeds from the book will be split between 826NYC, a writing center in Brooklyn offering free classes to students between the ages of 8 and 18, and Treehouse, a London-based charity for kids with autism.
Cristopher Hollingsworth - Alice beyond Wonderland
Alice beyond Wonderland explores the ubiquitous power of Lewis Carroll’s imagined world. Including work by some of the most prominent contemporary scholars in the field of Lewis Carroll studies, all introduced by Karoline Leach’s edgy foreword, Alice beyond Wonderland considers the literary, imaginative, and cultural influences of Carroll’s 19th-century story on the high-tech, postindustrial cultural space of the twenty-first century.
The scholars in this volume attempt to move beyond the sexually charged permutations of the "Carroll myth," the image of an introverted man fumbling into literary immortality through his love for a prepubescent Alice. Contributions include an essay comparing Dantean and Carrollian underworlds, one investigating child characters as double agents in untamed lands, one placing Wonderland within the geometrical and algebraic “fourth dimension,” one investigating the visual and verbal interplay of hand imagery, and one exploring the influence of Japanese translations of Alice on the Gothic-Lolita subculture of neo-Victorian enthusiasts. This is a bold, capacious, and challenging work.
H. G. Wells - An Englishman looks at the world
Ehhez a könyvhöz nincs fülszöveg, de ettől függetlenül még rukkolható/happolható.
Salman Rushdie - The Ground Beneath Her Feet
Vina Aspara, a famous and much-loved singer, is caught up in a devastating earthquake and never seen again. This is her story, and that of Ormus Cama, the lover who finds, loses, seeks and again finds her throughout his extraordinary life in music. It is narrated by Ormus's childhood friend, Rai.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - English Traits
During two influential visits to England (in 1833 and in 1847) where he met with literary icons such as Coleridge, Carlyle, and Wordsworth, Ralph Waldo Emerson recognized the source of everything American -- from the laws of society to the plot of a novel. Though he admired England's triumphs, he also presciently sensed the demise of a country weighed down by the *drag of inertia.* And though mesmerized by her literature, he would later encourage American writers to forge a style all their own. Written during a decade of great change for America, England, and for Emerson himself, English Traits illuminates Emerson's visionary thought as much as it vividly portrays 19th century England.
Ismeretlen szerző - The Best American Essays 2001
Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads hundreds of pieces from dozens of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to the twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected -- and most popular -- of its kind.
From The New Yorker to The Georgia Review, from Esquire to The American Scholar, the editors of THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS have scoured hundreds of the country's best periodicals in search of the most artful and powerful writing around. This thoughtful, provocative collection is the result of their search.