The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan


Ono no Komachi - 1988
    The poems speak intimately of their authors' sexual longing, fulfillment and disillusionment.

Fasting, Feasting


Anita Desai - 1999
    In both it is ultimately the women who suffer, whether, paradoxically, from a surfeit of feasting and family life in India, or from self-denial and starvation in the US. or both. Uma, the plain, older daughter still lives at home, frustrated in her attempts to escape and make a life for herself. Her Indian family is difficult , demanding but mostly, good hearted. Despite her disappointments, Uma comes through as the survivor, avoiding an unfulfilling marriage, liek her sister's or a suicidal one, like that arranged for her pretty cousin. And in America, where young Arun goes as a student, men in the suburbs char hunks of bleeding meat while the women don't appear to cook or eat at all - seems bewildering and terriying to the young Indian adolescent far from home.

Ghashiram Kotwal


Vijay Tendulkar - 1972
    The play is a political satire, written as historical drama. Based on the life of Nana Phadnavis (1741–1800), one of the prominent ministers in the court of the Peshwa of Pune. Its theme is how men in power give rise to ideologies to serve their purposes, and later destroy them when they become useless.

Nectar in a Sieve


Kamala Markandaya - 1954
    With remarkable fortitude and courage, she meets changing times and fights poverty and disaster.This beautiful and eloquent story tells of a simple peasant woman in a primitive village in India whose whole life is a gallant and persistent battle to care for those she loves—an unforgettable novel that "will wring your heart out" (The Associated Press).Named Notable Book of 1955 by the American Library Association.

Selected Poems


Anna Akhmatova - 1969
    Thomas' acclaimed translations of Akhmatova's poems. This volume includes "Requiem", her poem of the Stalinist Terror and "Poem Without a Hero".

Surrealist Love Poems


Mary Ann Caws - 2001
    And images of a fantastic idyll complete with falling stars, the sound of the sea, and beautiful countryside. In the hands of Surrealists, though, love poetry also includes gravediggers and murderers, dice and garbage, snakeskin purses and "the drunken kisses of cyclones." Surrealism, the movement founded in the 1920s on the ashes of Dada's nihilism, embraced absurdity, contradiction, and, to a supreme extent, passion and desire. From André Breton's battle cry of "Mad Love" to the quiet lyricism of Robert Desnos, Surrealist writers and artists obsessively expressed the permutations of that fundamental human state, love, and they did so with the vocabulary of natural and unnatural worlds, the explicit language of sex, and a great deal of humor.Surrealist Love Poems brings together sixty poems by Surrealists who charged their work with all forms of eroticism. Expertly and energetically edited by Mary Ann Caws, this collection seeks to demonstrate the truth of Breton's words, that "the embrace of poetry like that of bodies / As long as it lasts / Shuts out all the woes of the world.""Erotic, impassioned and necrophilic, the sixty works gathered in Surrealist Love Poems celebrate the idea of obsessive and transformative love. 'I want to sleep with you side by side. . . . Stretched out on your shadow / Hammered by your tongue / To die in a rabbit's rotting teeth / Happy' writes Joyce Mansour. . . . Caws places poems by major surrealist writers like André Breton and Paul Eluard, along with the poetry of Picasso, Dalí, and Frida Kahlo, side by side with fourteen lushly printed and alluring black-and-white photos by the likes of Man Ray, Lee Miller, and Claude Cahun."—Publishers Weekly

The Selected Poems of Po Chü-i


Bai Juyi - 1999
    In spite of his preeminent stature, this is the first edition of Po Chü?-i's poetry to appear in the West. It encompasses the full range of his work, from the early poems of social protest to the later recluse poems, whose spiritual depths reflect both his life-long devotion to Taoist and Ch'an (Zen) Buddhist practice. David Hinton's translations of ancient Chinese poetry have earned wide acclaim for creating compelling English texts that have altered our conception of Chinese poetry. Among his books published by New Directions are The Selected Poems of Tu Fu, and The Selected Poems of Li Po. His work has been supported by fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and The National Endowment for the Humanities.

Yayati: A Classic Tale of Lust


Vishnu Sakharam Khandekar - 1963
    Yayati was a great scholar and one of the noblest rulers of olden times. He followed the shastras and was devoted to the welfare of his subjects. Even the King of Gods, Indra, held him in high esteem. Married to seductively beautiful Devyani, in love with her maid Sharmishtha, and father of five sons from two women, yet Yayati unabashedly declares, My lust for pleasure is unsatisfied. His quest for the carnal continued, sparing not even his youngest son, and exchanging his old age for his son s youth.

Pierre Reverdy


Pierre Reverdy - 2013
    Reverdy’s poetry has exerted a special attraction on American poets, from Kenneth Rexroth to John Ashbery, and this new selection, featuring the work of fourteen distinguished translators, most of it appearing here for the first time, documents that ongoing relationship while offering readers the essential work of an extraordinary writer.Translated from the French by:John Ashbery Dan BellmMary Ann CawsLydia DavisMarilyn HackerRichard HowardGeoffrey O’BrienFrank O’HaraRon PadgettMark PolizzottiKenneth RexrothRichard SieburthPatricia TerryRosanna Warren

The Liberation of Sita


Volga - 2016
    In Volga’s retelling, it is Sita who, after being abandoned by Purushottam Rama, embarks on an arduous journey to self-realization. Along the way, she meets extraordinary women who have broken free from all that held them back: Husbands, sons and their notions of desire, beauty and chastity. The minor women characters of the epic as we know it – Surpanakha, Renuka, Urmila and Ahalya – steer Sita towards an unexpected resolution. Meanwhile, Rama too must reconsider and weigh out his roles as the king of Ayodhya and as a man deeply in love with his wife. A powerful subversion of India’s most popular tale of morality, choice and sacrifice, The Liberation of Sita opens up new spaces within the old discourse, enabling women to review their lives and experiences afresh. This is Volga at her feminist best.

Water


Bapsi Sidhwa - 2006
    There, she must live in penitence until her death. Unwilling to accept her fate, she becomes a catalyst for change in the widows’s lives. When her friend Kalyani, a beautiful widow-prostitute, falls in love with a young, upper-class Gandhian idealist, the forbidden affair boldly defies Hindu tradition and threatens to undermine the ashram’s delicate balance of power. This riveting look at the lives of widows in colonial India is ultimately a haunting and lyrical story of love, faith, and redemption.

The Far Field


Madhuri Vijay - 2019
    Certain that the loss of her mother is somehow connected to the decade-old disappearance of Bashir Ahmed, a charming Kashmiri salesman who frequented her childhood home, she is determined to confront him. But upon her arrival, Shalini is brought face to face with Kashmir's politics, as well as the tangled history of the local family that takes her in. And when life in the village turns volatile and old hatreds threaten to erupt into violence, Shalini finds herself forced to make a series of choices that could hold dangerous repercussions for the very people she has come to love.With rare acumen and evocative prose, in The Far Field Madhuri Vijay masterfully examines Indian politics, class prejudice, and sexuality through the lens of an outsider, offering a profound meditation on grief, guilt, and the limits of compassion.

Lifting the Veil: Selected Writings of Ismat Chughtai


Ismat Chughtai - 2001
    She wrote about the world that she knew, bringing the idiom of the middle class to Urdu prose, and totally transformed the complexion of Urdu fiction. Lifting the Veil brings together Ismat Chughtai's fiction and non-fiction writing. The twenty-one pieces in this selection are Chughtai at her best, marked by her brilliant turn of phrase, scintillating dialogue and wry humor, her characteristic irreverence, wit and eye for detail.

चुनी हुई कविताएँ


Atal Bihari Vajpayee - 2012
    Prabhat Prakashan has a glorious history of fifty years of publishing quality books on almost all streams of literature, viz. children books, fiction, science, quiz, humanities, personality development, health, dictionaries, encyclopedias, etc. For the last fifteen years, Prabhat Prakashan has been continuously winning accolades for excellence in book publication.

Last Words from Montmartre


Qiu Miaojin - 1996
    Unfolding through a series of letters written by an unnamed narrator, Last Words tells the story of a passionate relationship between two young women—their sexual awakening, their gradual breakup, and the devastating aftermath of their broken love. In a style that veers between extremes, from self-deprecation to pathos, compulsive repetition to rhapsodic musings, reticence to vulnerability, Qiu’s genre-bending novel is at once a psychological thriller, a sublime romance, and the author’s own suicide note.The letters (which, Qiu tells us, can be read in any order) leap between Paris, Taipei, and Tokyo. They display wrenching insights into what it means to live between cultures, languages, and genders—until the genderless character Zoë appears, and the narrator’s spiritual and physical identity is transformed. As powerfully raw and transcendent as Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Theresa Cha’s Dictée, to name but a few, Last Words from Montmartre proves Qiu Miaojin to be one of the finest experimentalists and modernist Chinese-language writers of our generation.