Jayant Kaikini’s gaze takes in the people in the corners of Mumbai—a bus driver who, denied vacation time, steals the bus to travel home; a slum dweller who catches cats and sells them for pharmaceutical testing; a father at his wit’s end who takes his mischievous son to a reform institution. In this metropolis, those who seek find epiphanies in dark movie theaters, the jostle of local trains, and even in roadside keychains and lost thermos flasks. Here, in the shade of an unfinished overpass, a factory worker and her boyfriend browse wedding invitations bearing wealthy couples’ affectations—“no presents please”—and look once more at what they own. Translated from the Kannada by Tejaswini Niranjana, these resonant stories, recently awarded the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, take us to photo framers, flower markets, and Irani cafes, revealing a city trading in fantasies while its strivers, eating once a day and sleeping ten to a room, hold secret ambitions close.

    Bombay Stories is a collection of Manto’s work from his years in the city. Freshly arrived in 1930s Mumbai, Manto saw a city like no other—an exhilarating hub of license and liberty, and a city bursting with both creative energy and helpless despondency. It was to be Manto’s favourite city, and he was among the first to write the Bombay characters we are now familiar with from countless stories and films—prostitutes, pimps, lowlifes, writers, intellectuals, aspiring film actors, thugs, conmen and crooks. His hard-edged, moving stories remain, a hundred years after his birth, startling and provocative--in searching out those forgotten by humanity, Manto wrote about what it means to be human. Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad’s translations reach into the streets and capture in contemporary, idiomatic English the feeling that Urdu’s most celebrated short-story writer’s work stories provide in the original.

    Its ceilings need plastering and some of the toilets leak appallingly, but its residents are far from desperate, though sometimes contentious and unforgiving. In these witty, poignant stories, Mistry charts the intersecting lives of Firozsha Baag, yielding a delightful collective portrait of a middle-class Indian community poised between the old ways and the new.

    Originated at digital platform of Facebook, the famous face of TV news, anchor Ravish Kumar has started writing micro fiction in a limited space of Facebook and twitter. The politics of our times figures as Metaphor in the loving exchange between characters. Laprek is a story of Love in cities. It is a story of Cities in love. रेम हम सबको बेहतर शहरी बनाता है। हम शहर के हर अनजान कोनों का सम्मान करने लगते हैं। उन कोनों में ज़िंदगी भर देते हैं... आप तभी एक शहर को नए सिरे से खोजते हैं जब प्रेम में होते हैं... और प्रेम में होना सिर्फ हाथ थामने का बहाना ढूँढना नहीं होता। दो लोगों के उस स्पेस में बहुत कुछ टकराता रहता है। 'लप्रेक' उसी कशिश और टकराहट की पैदाइश है।

    Critics around the world have embraced the book as a major work by this exciting young writer.

    A prostitute, her lover and a policeman play for high stakes in BombDay. Injectionwala exposes chilling medical malpractices and a lovelorn vigilantes twisted game plan. In Coma Man, a man awakens from coma after twenty years, and sets out in search of his wife and himself. Gritty love stories, manipulative cops and hard-boiled slumlords form the backdrop of this unputdownable thriller. Its MUMBAISTAN all the way. Mumbai, a city of dreams for many. But for others, a nightmare. Behind the façade of lustre and glamour churns a seething underbelly of squalor, corruption and crime. Mumbaistan’s three explosive crime novellas unravel the subterranean secrets of maximum city—from the teeming maw of Dharavi and the wanton streets of Kamathipura to the swank high-rises of Bandra. A prostitute, her lover and a policeman play for high stakes in Bomb-Day. Injectionwala exposes chilling medical malpractices and a lovelorn vigilante’s twisted game plan. In Coma Man, a man awakens from coma after twenty years, and sets out in search of his wife— and himself. Macabre love stories, conniving cops and hard-boiled slumlords form the backdrop of a schizophrenic city that is brooding...dying. Welcome to Mumbaistan; a gritty, compelling take on the megalopolis that lives on the edge.

    Tiloka, Rano's husband, is murdered leaving her with four children to look after and a hostile mother-in-law to contend with. Helpful friends and the village elders decide that Mangal, Tiloka's younger brother, should offer her protection in the form of marriage. And so a wedding of reluctant partners takes place.

    It's on India's southwestern coast, bounded by the Arabian Sea to the west and the Kaliamma River to the south and east. It's blessed with rich soil and scenic beauty, and it's been around for centuries. Of its 193,432 residents, only 89 declare themselves to be without religion or caste. And if the characters in Between the Assassinations are any indication, Kittur is an extraordinary crossroads of the brightest minds and the poorest morals, the up-and-coming and the downtrodden, and the poets and the prophets of an India that modern literature has rarely addressed. A twelve-year-old boy named Ziauddin, a gofer at a tea shop near the railway station, is enticed into wrongdoing because a fair-skinned stranger treats him with dignity and warmth. George D'Souza, a mosquito-repellent sprayer, elevates himself to gardener and then chauffeur to the lovely, young Mrs. Gomes, and then loses it all when he attempts to be something more. A little girl's first act of love for her father is to beg on the street for money to support his drug habit. A factory owner is forced to choose between buying into underworld economics and blinding his staff or closing up shop. A privileged schoolboy, using his own ties to the Kittur underworld, sets off an explosive in a Jesuit-school classroom in protest against casteism. A childless couple takes refuge in a rapidly diminishing forest on the outskirts of town, feeding a group of "intimates" who visit only to mock them. And the loneliest member of the Marxist-Maoist Party of India falls in love with the one young woman, in the poorest part of town, whom he cannot afford to wed. Between the Assassinations showcases the most beloved aspects of Adiga's writing to brilliant effect: the class struggle rendered personal; the fury of the underdog and the fire of the iconoclast; and the prodigiously ambitious narrative talent that has earned Adiga acclaim around the world and comparisons to Gogol, Ellison, Kipling, and Palahniuk. In the words of The Guardian (London), "Between the Assassinations shows that Adiga...is one of the most important voices to emerge from India in recent years." A blinding, brilliant, and brave mosaic of Indian life as it is lived in a place called Kittur, Between the Assassinations, with all the humor, sympathy, and unflinching candor of The White Tiger, enlarges our understanding of the world we live in today.

    NINE NUANCED STORIES THAT EXPLORE THE THEMES OF DESIRE, INTIMACY AND LOVE...A contractor at a dam site develops so obsessive a desire for a tribal woman that he brings home and holds captive another man's wife; a kathak dancer trapped in a marriage of convenience redefines notions of fidelity; an accidental step into an occupied bathroom changes a Delhi servant boy's life forever; a young married couple beleaguered by infertility desperately tries to reignite the romance and passion of their honeymoon on a houseboat in Kashmir...Set across India, each of the stories in this collection unerringly locates the defiant undercurrent of individual expression in people shackled by societal norms.

    The immaculately dressed Chowringhee, radiant in her youth, had just stepped on to the floor at the nightclub.’ Set in 1950s Calcutta, Chowringhee is a sprawling saga of the intimate lives of managers, employees and guests at one of Calcutta’s largest hotels, the Shahjahan. Shankar, the newest recruit, recounts the stories of several people whose lives come together in the suites, restaurants, bar and backrooms of the hotel. As both observer and participant in the events, he inadvertently peels off the layers of everyday existence to expose the seamy underbelly of unfulfilled desires, broken dreams, callous manipulation and unbidden tragedy. What unfolds is not just the story of individual lives but also the incredible chronicle of a metropolis. Written by best-selling Bengali author Sankar, Chowringhee was published as a novel in 1962. Predating Arthur Hailey’s Hotel by three years, it became an instant hit, spawning translations in major Indian languages, a film and a play. Its larger-than-life characters—the enigmatic manager Marco Polo, the debonair receptionist Sata Bose, the tragic hostess Karabi Guha, among others—soon attained cult status. With its thinly veiled accounts of the private lives of real-life celebrities, and its sympathetic narrative seamlessly weaving the past and the present, it immediately established itself as a popular classic. Available for the first time in English, Chowringhee is as much a dirge as it is a homage to a city and its people.An excerpt (Chapter 1) from the book :http://arunavasinha.in/2011/05/27/cho...

    Economic and social conflict in a north Indian village are brilliantly captured in the story of Hori, a poor farmer and his family’s struggle for survival and self-respect. Hori does everything he can to fulfill his life’s desire: to own a cow, the peasant’s measure of wealth and well-being. Like many Hindus of his time, he believes that making the gift of a cow to a Brahman before he dies will help him achieve salvation. An engaging introduction to India before Independence, Godaan is at once village ethnography, moving human document and insightful colonial history.

    Winner of the Hutch Crossword Book Award 2006, this collection is an enduring testimony of the ideology and belief that Ambai's writings affirm-the need to know and be in touch with a stable or 'grounded' self that allows fluidity and change in modern times of travel, dislocation, and exile.

    K. Narayan’s centennialIntroducing this collection of stories, R. K. Narayan describes how in India “the writer has only to look out of the window to pick up a character and thereby a story.” Composed of powerful, magical portraits of all kinds of people, and comprising stories written over almost forty years, Malgudi Days presents Narayan’s imaginary city in full color, revealing the essence of India and of human experience. This edition includes an introduction by Pulitzer Prize- winning author Jhumpa Lahiri. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

    . . a gripping mystery'Apostolos DoxiadisMulti-Award Winning Author of the New York Times Bestseller LogicomixAN ANCIENT CITYAN AGELESS TRADITIONA MODERN MURDERThey don’t come better than Divya. ‘Uber-smart’ does not even begin to describe it. And even a single-digit All-India rank in everything is nothing more than a left-handed demonstration of the kind of stuff she is made of. But the limits of her prowess are suddenly tested when her professor, Lakshman, springs a bizarre new assignment on her—helping out Joshua Ezekiel.A world-renowned computer scientist at MIT, Joshua is now in India and in deep, deep trouble. A criminal genius who happens to be his former student is brutally murdered, leaving Joshua trapped in the mess and mayhem that follow.With Lakshman and Divya firmly on his side, Joshua begins digging up his crooked protégé’s sinister trail of secrets—secrets which spiral out of an ancient Indian city and unleash shockwaves much, much, beyond . . .A mind-blowing cocktail of science and religion, mythology and technology, history and human greed, The Steradian Trail fires the starting shot of an explosive new series in style.'A gripping novel . . . a pacey thriller . . . An enjoyable read . . . An impressive debut!'Guillermo MartínezMulti-Award Winning Author of the International Bestseller The Oxford Murders

    This selection features twenty-one of the very best stories from the region.Here, the reader will find one of Rabindranath Tagore’s most revered stories ‘The Kabuliwallah’ in a glinting new translation, memorable studies of ordinary people from Tarashankar and Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, the iconic Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s wrenching study of Bengali society, ‘Mahesh’, as well as over a dozen other astounding stories by some of the greatest practitioners of the form—Buddhadeva Bose, Ashapurna Debi, Premendra Mitra, Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Mahasweta Devi, Sunil Gangopadhyay and Nabarun Bhattacharya, among others. These are stories of anger, loss, grief, disillusionment, magic, politics, trickery, humour and the darkness of mind and heart. They reimagine life in ways that make them unforgettable.