Nobles at the court of Awadh, the chess-addicts Mir and Mirza, move to an undisclosed location to play undisturbed as their kingdom falls around them..Shorts stories were the inspiration for fourteen of master filmmaker Satyajit Ray's movies, every one of them a classic - Devi, Jalsaghar and Shatranj Ke Khiladi, among them. This book brings together all of those stories in one volume. These tales, by the likes of Rabindranath Tagore, Tarashankar Bandopadhyay, Prabhat Kumar Mukhopadhyay, Rajshekhar Basu and Premchand, are milestones in Indian literature quite apart from their cinematic glory. The anthology also contains two stories by Ray himself -Atithi and Pikoor Diary, that illustrate his own craft as a writer. From the dramatic to the starkly real, the humorous to the dark, the lyrical to the prosaic, Fourteen Stories... sparkles with narrative brilliance. Read together, these stories also provide us with the context for a new insight into the mind of one of India's most loved and revered filmmakers.

    The literature is chronologically arranged by genre and supported by informative and concise editorial matter, including a complete guide to writing about literature at the back of the book. This volume in Bedford/St. Martin’s popular series of Portable Anthologies and Guides offers the series’ trademark combination of high quality and great value.

    An anthology then, should be a small token of something much larger. In the case of flowers, they bring to mind the colour & fragrance of the fields, of a season. Coelho's anthology, therefore, is not only a collection of texts or poems, but a gift, something arranged according to his sensitivities, to give to others. The selection of books presented in this volume have been chosen as if from a vast field of flowers, stretching infinitely into time's horizon. Coelho's selection is ordered in to the four elements, symbolizing both our world on all its directions, and the way we dwell in it, the way we say it. In 'Earth' we find writers as diverse as Oscar Wilde and D H Lawrence; in 'Air' Nelson Mandela and Gabriel Garcia Marques; in 'Fire' Rumi and Mary Shelley; in 'Water' Hans Christian Anderson and Machiavelli.