Love, life & all that jazz....


Ahmed Faiyaz - 2010
    It’s about where they go from here, the changes they see in themselves and in other people in their lives and the choices they make. The choices make affects their relationships and shapes their personality.

The Steradian Trail


M.N. Krish - 2013
    . . 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

Insider


R.V. Raman - 2016
    But sometimes, there is a price to be paid ...– A SOFTWARE ENGINEER goes missing in the Baltic.– AN UNSCRUPULOUS STOCKBROKER is audaciously murdered in a crowded bar room.– A HOTSHOT CEO is accused of insider trading.When Shashi Kurva, one of the country's most successful CEOs, is named in an insider trading scandal, he is stunned. Utterly blindsided, he makes desperate attempts to prove his innocence and identify the real culprit, only to stumble upon a conspiracy that hits far too close to home.Racing between the boardroom, a stockbroking firm and a shattered family, Insider is a tale of duplicity and avarice, manipulation and murder, that takes you into the murky depths of the Indian stock market and data analytics, where profit is the only object, and money the only language.While comparisons to veteran thriller writer John Grisham are inevitable, Raman's writing is more inspired by the older canon of crime writing - The New Indian Express RV Raman picks a crime fiction to make a debut and weaves a tight plot and a clear narrative to keep you engrossed.- The Hindustan Times If art imitates life, then we all need to be very worried ... an insider's account of the less than salubrious side of the corporate world. - Deccan Chronicle

Blow-Up and Other Stories


Julio Cortázar - 1968
    . . A man reading a mystery finds out too late that he is the murderer's victim . . . In the fifteen stories collected here—including "Blow-Up," which was the basis for Michelangelo Antonioni's film of the same name—Julio Cortazar explores the boundary where the everyday meets the mysterious, perhaps even the terrible.Axolotl House taken over Distances Idol of the Cyclades Letter to a young lady in Paris Yellow flower Continuity of parks Night face up Bestiary Gates of heaven Blow-up End of the game At your service Pursuer Secret weapons.

Things We Lost in the Fire


Mariana Enríquez - 2016
    In these stories, reminiscent of Shirley Jackson and Julio Cortázar, three young friends distract themselves with drugs and pain in the midst a government-enforced blackout; a girl with nothing to lose steps into an abandoned house and never comes back out; to protest a viral form of domestic violence, a group of women set themselves on fire. But alongside the black magic and disturbing disappearances, these stories are fueled by compassion for the frightened and the lost, ultimately bringing these characters—mothers and daughters, husbands and wives—into a surprisingly familiar reality. Written in hypnotic prose that gives grace to the grotesque, Things We Lost in the Fire is a powerful exploration of what happens when our darkest desires are left to roam unchecked, and signals the arrival of an astonishing and necessary voice in contemporary fiction.

Mumbaistan


Piyush Jha - 2012
    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.

Sweet Days of Discipline


Fleur Jaeggy - 1989
    With the off-handed knowingness of a remorseless young Eve, the narrator describes life as a captive of the school and her designs to win the affections of the apparently perfect new girl, Fréderique. As she broods over her schemes as well as on the nature of control and madness, the novel gathers a suspended, unsettling energy. Now translated into six languages, I beati anni del castigo in its Italian original won the 1990 Premio Bagutta and the 1990 Premio Speciale Rapallo. In Tim Parks’ consummate translation (with its "spare, haunting quality of a prose poem"), Sweet Days of Discipline was selected as one of the London Times Literary Supplement’s Notable Books of 1992: "In a period when novels are generally overblown and scarcely portable, it is good to be able to recommend [one that is] miraculously short and beautifully written."

Darkness


Ratnakar Matkari - 2019
    An elderly woman who knows that death is close, but learns how to cheat it... A child with a dangerous friend who happens to be invisible... A ghost who can't stop reliving his suicide over and over again... People you'll wish you never have to meet, and stories you'll never forget. Skilfully translated into English for the very first time, these chilling tales from master storyteller Ratnakar Matkari are bound to keep readers of all ages up at night. With every page you turn, you'll be looking over your shoulder to make sure no one's there. Look again. Maybe there is!

Johnny Too Bad


John Dufresne - 2005
    A cross between William Faulkner (Times-Picayune) and John Irving (Detroit Free Press), Dufresne once again masterfully charts the power of truth and lies and the magic hidden in the mundane.

Soul


Andrei Platonov - 1934
    In recent decades, however, these lost works have reemerged, and the eerie poetry and poignant humanity of Platonov’s vision have become ever more clear. For Nadezhda Mandelstam and Joseph Brodsky, Platonov was the writer who most profoundly registered the spiritual shock of revolution. For a new generation of innovative post-Soviet Russian writers he figures as a daring explorer of word and world, the master of what has been called “alternative realism.” Depicting a devastated world that is both terrifying and sublime, Platonov is, without doubt, a universal writer who is as solitary and haunting as Kafka.This volume gathers eight works that show Platonov at his tenderest, warmest, and subtlest. Among them are “The Return,” about an officer’s difficult homecoming at the end of World War II, described by Penelope Fitzgerald as one of “three great works of Russian literature of the millennium”; “The River Potudan,” a moving account of a troubled marriage; and the title novella, the extraordinary tale of a young man unexpectedly transformed by his return to his Asian birthplace, where he finds his people deprived not only of food and dwelling, but of memory and speech.This prizewinning English translation is the first to be based on the newly available uncensored texts of Platonov’s short fiction.

Another Man's Wife and Other Stories


Manjul Bajaj - 2012
    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.

Bavian


Naja Marie Aidt - 2006
    Though they are built around the common themes of sex, love, desire, and gender, Aidt pushes them into her own desperate, frantic realm. In one, a whore shows up unannounced at a man’s apartment, roosts in his living room, and then violently threatens him when he tries to make her leave. In another, a wife takes her husband to a city where it is women, not men, who are the dominant sex—but was it all a hallucination when she finds herself tied to a board and dragged back to his car? And in the unforgettable “Blackcurrant,” two young women who have turned away from men and toward lesbianism abscond to a farm, where they discover that their neighbor’s son is experimenting with his own kind of sexuality. The first book from the widely lauded Aidt to reach the English language, Baboon delivers audacious writing that careens toward bizarre, yet utterly truthful, realizations.

In Memory of Memory


Maria Stepanova - 2017
    Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of an ordinary family that somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century. The family’s pursuit of a quiet, civilized, ordinary life—during such atrocious times—is itself a strange odyssey.In dialogue with thinkers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken, poetic voice. Dipping into various genres—essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and history—Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers a bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.

Chowringhee


Sankar - 1962
    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...

Autumn


Karl Ove Knausgård - 2015
    Now, as I write this, you know nothing about anything, about what awaits you, the kind of world you will be born into. And I know nothing about you...I want to show you our world as it is now: the door, the floor, the water tap and the sink, the garden chair close to the wall beneath the kitchen window, the sun, the water, the trees. You will come to see it in your own way, you will experience things for yourself and live a life of your own, so of course it is primarily for my own sake that I am doing this: showing you the world, little one, makes my life worth living.Autumn begins with a letter Karl Ove Knausgaard writes to his unborn daughter, showing her what to expect of the world. He writes one short piece per day, describing the material and natural world with the precision and mesmerising intensity that have become his trademark. He describes with acute sensitivity daily life with his wife and children in rural Sweden, drawing upon memories of his own childhood to give an inimitably tender perspective on the precious and unique bond between parent and child. The sun, wasps, jellyfish, eyes, lice—the stuff of everyday life is the fodder for his art. Nothing is too small or too vast to escape his attention.This beautifully illustrated book is a personal encyclopaedia on everything from chewing gum to the stars. Through close observation of the objects and phenomena around him, Knausgaard shows us how vast, unknowable and wondrous the world is.