An inquiry is promptly launched and Ravi, the suspect is placed under an elaborate regime of surveillance. The investigation subsequently throws up a huge amount of evidence, showing the suspect stealing sensitive data. As panic sets in, investigators acrimoniously debate whether to allow the suspect to walk free or physically force him to own up his crime. For Jeevnathan, the problem also is how to keep the tiring watchers going and persuade an edgy Chief to stay on course. As the story enters 96th Day, paradoxical consequences follow.Loosely inspired by a true incident that took place in 2004 when a senior intelligence officer suspected of being a spy for decades vanished, the story also treats us to a rare insight into the state of security awareness of employees in the Agency, constrains in conducting aggressive operations, pitfalls in liaison relationship, competing interests of intelligence services, hazards in co-ordination of intelligence inputs and the Kashmir imbroglio.

    His brother, Manav, is quiet and intuitive. He is also brilliant at solving cases. When Shravya Chandra, wife of Arun Chandra the film star, goes missing – Ashish and Manav have their own hunches. Ashish is out to prove Arun Chandra’s guilt. But Manav wants to know more about Shravya’s old friend, Anchal because he’s certain that she is hiding something big. They both can’t be right, of course.Ashish doesn’t want to be wrong; he’s never wrong. And Manav would give anything to snatch a victory from under his brother’s nose. Who’s right? And at what cost are they going to win? Since everyone’s looking only for what they want to see, will they ever actually find out what happened to Shravya Chandra?And so begins the battle of egos, the endless search for a killer and the unravelling of secrets…

    Vonnegut’s absolute familiarity with science fiction tropes and his mocking contempt for them are well displayed in a story which shifts between tragic cartoon and straightforward projection. His highly evolved humans in an indeterminate future have become body-transcending spirits and Vonnegut handles this vaporous situation with deadpan comedy suspended over unspeakable loss, a characteristic technique. In its fluidity--the story is parody masked as extrapolation; no, it is a horror story in the form of a parody. This kind of cross-category narrative attack was often used by Vonnegut and makes him difficult to label; he is too serious to be funny, too absurd (as in jailbreak or as in the concept of Billy Pilgrim’s alien Tralmalfadorians) to be taken as realism. Vonnegut when he wrote this story at 30 was still trying to find his voice, identify his material; as a laboratory of his enveloping subject matter and technique UNREADY TO WEAR is particularly interesting and disturbing, demonstrating that Vonnegut could have gone in any number of directions and perhaps by deliberately failing to make a decision, found his voice through indeterminacy. It is as a poet of indeterminacy then that Vonnegut went on to write his most famous novel, SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE.ABOUT THE AUTHORKurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) is one of the most beloved American writers of the twentieth century. Vonnegut's audience increased steadily since his first five pieces in the 1950s and grew from there. His 1968 novel Slaughterhouse-Five has become a canonic war novel with Joseph Heller's Catch-22 to form the truest and darkest of what came from World War II.Vonnegut began his career as a science fiction writer, and his early novels--Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan--were categorized as such even as they appealed to an audience far beyond the reach of the category. In the 1960s, Vonnegut became closely associated with the Baby Boomer generation, a writer on that side, so to speak.Now that Vonnegut's work has been studied as a large body of work, it has been more deeply understood and unified. There is a consistency to his satirical insight, humor and anger which makes his work so synergistic. It seems clear that the more of Vonnegut's work you read, the more it resonates and the more you wish to read. Scholars believe that Vonnegut's reputation (like Mark Twain's) will grow steadily through the decades as his work continues to increase in relevance and new connections are formed, new insights made.ABOUT THE SERIESHorace Gold led GALAXY magazine from its first issue dated October 1950 to science fiction’s most admired, widely circulated and influential magazine throughout its initial decade. Its legendary importance came from publication of full length novels, novellas and novelettes. GALAXY published nearly every giant in the science fiction field.The Galaxy Project is a selection of the best of GALAXY with new forewords by some of today’s best science fiction writers. The initial selections in alphabetical order include work by Ray Bradbury, Frederic Brown, Lester del Rey, Robert A. Heinlein, Damon Knight, C. M. Kornbluth, Walter M. Miller, Jr., Frederik Pohl, Robert Scheckley, Robert Silverberg, William Tenn (Phillip Klass) and Kurt Vonnegut with new Forewords by Paul di Filippo, David Drake, John Lutz, Barry Malzberg and Robert Silverberg. The Galaxy Project is committed to publishing new work in the spirit GALAXY magazine and its founding editor Horace Gold.

    

    Although Pakhom enjoys health and family happiness, he feels dissatisfied when he learns of the grand fortunes of his relatives. He decides to go on a quest for more land, only to find that with each new acquisition new problems develop... How Much Land Does A Man Need? gives a delightful insight into old Russian values

    Now Tehmina is being asked to choose between her old, familiar life in India and a new one in Ohio with her son, his American wife, and their child. She must decide whether to leave the comforting landscape of her native India for the strange rituals of life in a new country.This is a journey Tehmina, a middle-aged Parsi woman, must travel alone.The Parsis were let into India almost a millennium ago because of their promise to "sweeten" and enrich the lives of the people in their adopted country. This is an ancient promise that Tehmina takes seriously. And so, while faced with the larger choice of whether to stay in America or not, Tehmina is also confronted with another, more urgent choice: whether to live in America as a stranger or as a citizen. Citizenship implies connection, participation, and involvement. Soon destiny beckons in the form of two young, troubled children next door. It is the plight of these two boys that forces Tehmina to choose. She will either straddle two worlds forever and live in a no-man's land or jump into the fullness of her new life in America.If Today Be Sweet is a novel that celebrates family and community. It is an honest but affectionate look at contemporary America—the sterility of its suburban life, the tinsel of its celebrity culture, but also the generosity of its people and their thirst for connection and communication. Eloquently written, evocative, and unforgettable, If Today Be Sweet is a poignant look at issues of immigration, identity, family life, and hope. It is a novel that shows how cultures can collide and become better for it.

    He’s a rich successful businessman, however, and she’s a small-town girl who doesn’t fit into his glittering world; a fact that Abhimanyu’s mother has taken pains to point out.Will they ever overcome the odds, or are their lives on parallel tracks, never destined to cross?

    The Frogs is an unforgettable read by one of India’s most-loved authors.

    The thirty nine short stories in this book will blow you away. Starting with a ghoststory by Rabindranath Tagore, India's most famous writer and ending with a fable by Kanishk Tharoor, a writer who has come of age in the twenty first century, these literary masterpieces showcase the extraordinary range and diversity of our story telling tradition. The first recognizably modern Indian short stories were written in Bengal (by Tagore andothers) in the second half of the nineteenth century and writers from other regions werequick to follow suit, often using the form to protest colonial oppression and the various illsafflicting rural and urban India. Over the next century and a half, some of the finest writers the world has seen produced outstanding fiction in every conceivable genre. Many of these stories find a place in this volume, as does work by emerging talent that has never been published in book form before. Here you will find stories of classical realism, ones rootedin folklore and myth, tales of fantasy, humour, horror, crime and romance, stories set invillages, small towns, cities and the moon. They will entertain you and shock you, they will lighten your mood and cast you down, they will move you and they will make you reflect onlife's big and little questions. Most of all, they will make you see the world differently as the greatest stories always do.

    . . .The yellow glowed beautifully in the morning light. There was something different about this particular yellow. This one entered through his eyes, dissolved in his blood, and went straight to his heart.” Uday Prakash’s novel of contemporary India is a tender love story—university student Rahul is swept away by a “sweet fever” of love for Anjali, the enchanting girl with the golden parasol. But Prakash’s tale is set in a world where the 3,000-year-old Hindu caste system still holds sway and social realities doom the chances of a non-Brahmin boy who loves a Brahmin girl. The Girl with the Golden Parasol is the first English translation of Prakash’s work to be published in the United States. His audacious novel captures the profound contradictions of India today, where the forces aligned against change outweigh even the power of love.

    The Gupta dynasty is stepping into its golden ageBut the past holds many dark secrets... After long and bloody wars, Samrat Samudragupta sits on the pinnacle of an empire. yet, close to his throne are hearts filled with revenge, scheming to bring him down.Into this gathering storm arrives Chandragupta, the king’s long-lost son. As he settles into his new life devastating family secrets surface, old wounds are reopened and Chandra can no longer trust anyone – least of all those closest to him. Bizarre and sinister incidents abound as palace conspiracies unravel plunging Rajgriha into a pit of chaos. Will the son pay for the sins of his father?Yoddha: The Dynasty of Samudragupta unfolds the murky loves and lies of one of the most illustrious clans in history.

    For this reason, she's obliged her old-fashioned grandmother by not doing well in school. She’s also resigned to remaining unwed; with three girls in the family, there’s simply not enough dowry to go around.Then a wedding alliance arrives for her oldest sister—a fair-skinned beauty. There's great rejoicing in their household. And, why not? The prospective father-in-law is the right-hand man of an important politician. As Pullamma helps ready the house for the bride-viewing—by washing the cow, by stringing flowers along doorways—she prays for the alliance to go through. Then something happens.Something so inconceivable, it will shape Pullamma's future in ways even the local soothsayer couldn’t have foretold.Tell A Thousand Lies is a sometimes sassy, sometimes sad but, ultimately, realistic look at how superstition, and the colour of a girl's skin, rules India's hinterlands.

    According to Grandmother, girls didn't need an education, they didn't need love and affection or time to play or even a good piece of meat with their gravy! Naturally Dielieno hates her with a vengeance. This is the evocative tale of a young girl growing up in a traditional society in India's Northeast, which is in the midst of tremendous change. Easterine Iralu writes about a place and a people that she knows well and is a part of and brings to the storytelling a lyrical beauty which can on occasion chill the reader with its realistic portrayals of the spirits of the dead that inhabit the quiet hills and valleys of Nagaland.

    For Emily, romance is in the air. For the mysterious Mrs Forester, there is scandal brewing. And for the Bishop of Simla, rainclouds are not the only storms on the horizon...The Hill Station is the novel on which J.G. Farrell was working at the time of his tragically early accidental death. It demonstrates powerfully what a great loss to world literature this was.

    Set in the sweltering streets of Toturpuram, a small city on the Bay of Bengal, The Hero's Walk, which won the 2001 Commonwealth Writers Prize for best book in Canada and the Caribbean, explores the troubled life of Sripathi Rao, an unremarkable, middle-aged family man and advertising copywriter. As The Hero's Walk opens, Sripathi's life is already in a state of thorough disrepair. His mother, a domineering, half-senile octogenarian, sits like a tyrant at the top of his household, frightening off his sister's suitors, chastising him for not having become a doctor, and brandishing her hypochondria and paranoia with sinister abandon. It is Sripathi's children, however, who pose the biggest problems: Arun, his son, is becoming dangerously involved in political activism, and Maya, his daughter, broke off her arranged engagement to a local man in order to wed a white Canadian. Sripathi's troubles come to a head when Maya and her husband are killed in an automobile accident, leaving their 7- year-old daughter, Nandana, without Canadian kin. Sripathi travels to Canada and brings his granddaughter home, while his family is shaken by a series of calamities that may, eventually, bring peace to their lives. --Jack Illingworth