Hard to imagine that no one counts,that only things endure.Unlike the seasons, our shirts don't shed,Whatever we see does not see us,however hard we look,The rain in its silver earrings against the oak trunks,The rain in its second skin.--from "Scar Tissue II"In his new collection, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Wright investigates the tenuous relationship between description and actuality--"thing is not an image"--but also reaffirms the project of attempting to describe, to capture the natural world and the beings in it, although he reminds us that landscape is not his subject matter but his technique: that language was always his subject--language and "the ghost of god." And in the dolomites, the clouds, stars, wind, and water that populate these poems, "something un-ordinary persists."Scar Tissue is a groundbreaking work from a poet who "illuminates and exalts the entire astonishing spectrum of existence" (Booklist).

    In Rashid's opium room the air is thick and potent. A beautiful young woman leans to hold a long-stemmed pipe over a flame, her hair falling across her dark eyes. Around her, men sprawl and mutter in the gloom, each one drifting with his own tide. Here, people say that you introduce only your worst enemy to opium.Outside, stray dogs lope in packs. Street vendors hustle. Hookers call for custom through the bars of their cages as their pimps slouch in doorways in the half-light. There is an underworld whisper of a new terror: the Pathar Maar, the stone killer, whose victims are the nameless, invisible poor. There are too many of them to count in this broken city.Narcopolis is a rich, chaotic, hallucinatory dream of a novel that captures the Bombay of the 1970s in all its compelling squalor. With a cast of pimps, pushers, poets, gangsters and eunuchs, it is a journey into a sprawling underworld written in electric and utterly original prose.

    As he sets about reducing her to his idealised version of a kept woman, bullying her out of her life as an academic and writer in the process, she attempts to push back - a resistance he resolves to break with violence and rape. Smart, fierce and courageous When I Hit You is a dissection of what love meant, means and will come to mean when trust is undermined by violence; a brilliant, throat-tightening feminist discourse on battered faces and bruised male egos; and a scathing portrait of traditional wedlock in modern India.

    The book features curated old favourites and brand new tales as well as exclusive entries by Penguin's bestselling authors.The page-turner of the year, the volume is sure to occupy a unique space on your shelf, making for great introspection and even better conversation.

    On a visit to this remote, majestic outpost of India, Vikram and Aditya camp out on the lofty Changtang plateau. Here they meet a young Tibetan boy named Tsering. But Tsering is unexpectedly abducted and Aditya pulls off a daring rescue. Suddenly Vikram and Aditya are on the run. On the frozen plateau, often referred to as the "roof of the world", the schoolboys play a dangerous game of hide-and-seek with a band of mysterious determined men. Traversing the barren wastes of Ladakh, the story moves to the mountain-city of Leh. Who is Tsering? Why is he being chased with such fierce resolve? Discover the fascinating secret of Tsering in this fast-moving adventure tale. "Ladakh Adventure" is another enthralling VikramAditya story, set in a wonderous land of startling contrasts and magnificent mountains.

    Made-to-order for those with a taste for inventive idiosyncrasy, this book promises to provoke and entertain in equal measure. About the author: Ishavasyam took a sabbatical from her career in marketing to fulfil her childhood dream of writing a book. Besides weaving tall tales, she loves playing board games and belly dancing. She is a hoarder of art supplies, and has an alarming number of incomplete DIY projects. Ishavasyam lives with her husband, whom she adores to bits, to the point where she may soon give in to his incessant plea to get a dog.

    Over 21 days five murder cases were discovered that led to the unravelling of a spine-chilling tale of cold-blooded crime. Half-naked bodies; missing suspects; a desperate manhunt; connections with the underworld, police and Bollywood; and a seductress who lured victims - all led to a man named Vijay Palande.Palande, who targeted dreamers, mainly Bollywood aspirants in Mumbai, had an uncomplicated modus operandi - he would befriend the target, gauge his wealth, murder him, hack his body into pieces, and abandon the remains in the Western Ghats. Equipped with the sophistication of Charles Sobhraj, the nonchalance of serial-killer Raman Raghav and the cruelty of Jack the Ripper, Palande had the country hooked.In The Front Page Murders, Puja Changoiwala, who covered the story as it came to light, recounts in gripping detail one of the most sensational cases in India’s recent history and the personalities involved in it. In doing so, she delves into the functioning of daily crime reporting and police investigations, providing startling insights into the worlds of journalism and crime

    In the title story—written in a lonely hotel room in Geneva soon after the author began his work with the United Nations—a young Indian orphan is on his way to visit America for the first time, and his anguish and longing in the airplane seem hardly different from those of any American child. Tharoor’s admiration for P. G. Wodehouse makes “How Bobby Chatterjee Turned to Drink” a delightful homage, while “The Temple Thief,” “The Simple Man,” and “The Political Murder” bring to mind O. Henry and Maupassant. His three college stories, “Friends,” “The Pyre,” and “The Professor’s Daughter,” are full of youthful high jinks, naïve infatuations, and ingenious wordplay. “The Solitude of the Short-Story Writer” is a smart, self-aware, Woody Allen-esque exploration of a writer’s conflicted relationship with his psychiatrist.

    Ironically, it also became the chant of millions on the streets of India against the project of Hindu Nationalism.Even as Arundhati Roy began to ask what lay between these two calls for Freedom—a chasm or a bridge?—the streets fell silent. Not only in India, but all over the world. The coronavirus brought with it another, more terrible understanding of Azadi, making a nonsense of international borders, incarcerating whole populations, and bringing the modern world to a halt like nothing else ever could.In this series of electrifying essays, Arundhati Roy challenges us to reflect on the meaning of freedom in a world of growing authoritarianism.The essays include meditations on language, public as well as private, and on the role of fiction and alternative imaginations in these disturbing times.The pandemic, she says, is a portal between one world and another. For all the illness and devastation it has left in its wake, it is an invitation to the human race, an opportunity, to imagine another world.

    99 to be exact. bleeding out to the backdrop of this new cartoon. a woodchuck in a tiny witch hat laughs at you, as you lay down, hands over your chest and think, 'perfect.' and a red light atop a powerline blinks in the distance to remind that there is no end, only one long try, deflate at your own pace. don't fight the freefall. 99 poems to cure whatever's wrong with you or create the problems you need. and yes, you need. im your fucking dad, honey. admit it, or we'll never get out of this alive.

    Poetry for those wishing to know someone special while seeking the greater challenge to know themselves.

    At first, the murder seems an open-and-shut case to Dechen, the tough, foul- mouthed, prickly lady cop in charge of the investigation. But as she begins to delve into the lives of Kamala and Puran, she discovers a world of lies, deceit and love gone wrong, where nothing is as it seems, and the guilt of murderers is difficult to establish.On a day of endless rain, a man emerges from thirty-two years of isolation to meet his king, whom he owes a share of the harvest from his fields. Journeying across leech-infested forests and forbidding valleys, he tells his children the story of his life one that has been full of drama and magic. But the biggest miracle of all awaits him in Gangtok...These two novellas, united by their strong sense of place, showcase Chetan Raj Shresthas enormous gifts as a storyteller. Magical, gritty, nerve-wracking and stylish in equal measure, this is an exceptional debut.

    Here is a poet talking to you instead of around himself, while doing absolutely brilliant and outrageous things with language."--Publishers WeeklyStarred Review in Booklist "[C]hoices of poems from each of Harrison's books are passionate and sharp... Of special note is a section from Letters to Yesenin, a book-length poem, and the title poem from The Theory and Practice of Rivers , which contains these echoing lines, 'I forgot where I heard that poems / are designed to waken sleeping gods.' Reading this essential volume, one might imagine that the gods are, indeed, staying up late, reading lights on, turning the pages."Jim Harrison: The Essential Poems is distilled from fourteen volumes--from visionary lyrics and meditative suites to shape-shifting ghazals and prose-poem letters. Teeming throughout these pages are Harrison's legendary passions and appetites, his meditations, rages, and love-songs to the natural world.The New York Times concluded a review from early in Harrison's career with a provocative quote: "This is poetry worth loving, hating, and fighting over, a subjective mirror of our American days and needs." That sentiment still holds true, as Jim Harrison's essential poems continue to call for our fiercest attention.Also included are full-color images of poem drafts--both typescripts and holographs--as well as the letter Denise Levertov sent to publisher W.W. Norton in the early 1960s, advocating for Harrison's debut collection.In his essay "Poetry as Survival," Jim Harrison wrote, "Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak." The Essential Poems is proof positive that Jim Harrison taught his soul to speak."In this unforgiving literary moment, we must deal honestly with [Harrison's] life and work, as they are inextricable in a way that is not true of other poets...These poems bear-crawl gorgeously after a genuine connection to being, thrashing in giant leaps through the underbrush to find consolation, purpose, and redemption. In his raw, original keening he ambushes moments of unimaginable beauty, one after another, line after line...The Essential Poems demonstrates perfectly why we should turn to Harrison again. He lived and breathed an American confrontation with the physical earth, married himself to a universe of bodies and stumps and birds, did not try to shuck his grotesque masculinity and stared hard with his one good eye (the left was blinded when he was seven) at the inescapable, beckoning finger of death." --Dean Kuipers, LitHub"The Essential Poems provides a good introduction--or reintroduction--to the work of this singular writer... these pieces illustrate Harrison's range and his ease with various formats, from lyric poems to meditative suites to prose poems. They also spotlight his deep, rugged kinship with rural landscapes and the natural world, where 'the cost of flight is landing.'" --The Washington Post"Jim Harrison's latest collection, The Essential Poems, contains...engaging and enlightening poems [that] should be taught, learned, and loved. Remember this."--New York Journal of Books"Had he been a chef, all the other foodies would have talked about how Jim Harrison dealt with big flavors. In his poems, they're all there -- love and death, remorse and longing, the rocket contrails of living. There's not a lot of small talk in The Essential Poems... this book grabs you by the collar and tells you in eleven hundred ways to wake up."--John Freeman, Executive Editor, "Recommended Reading from Lit Hub Staff""Jim Harrison had an appetite. He devoured the natural world with gusto and wrote about it with wild energy and sweetly caustic wit...Harrison was also a prodigious poet, and this thoughtfully curated collection [The Essential Poems] showcases him at his best. Like his fiction, the poems observe the collision between civilization and the wildness outside our cities; they act like geocaches both harrowing and beautiful... Organized chronologically, the material here becomes a time line distilling Harrison's signature concerns."--Alta"It is hard-boiled poetry, some of the best of its kind, and one is not surprised to know that Harrison has written very tough novels... His poetic vision is at the heart of it all."--Harper's

    Set in politically charged Shillong, this interconnected collection of stories speaks of the coming-of-age of a young woman–and the city and community she calls home.

    Apart from this, many a times each state of each nation has role models from the past but not forgotten history. Maharashtra has its own idols. The greatest and most loved of them all is shivaji maharaj.