Books

The Binge Writer

Devika Bakshi

Madeline Miller can write for 14 hours a day and still maintains she does not deserve to be called a writer. She won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2012

Pataudi, through Many Eyes

Akshay Sawai

This tribute to Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi brings into clear focus the cricketer who broke regional barriers in India’s dressing room

The Perils of ChickLit

arindam

Psychological hazards may lurk between the covers of such books

The Difficulty of Being Invisible

Chinki Sinha

Mayank Austen Soofi has a very instrusive presence on the pages of his book on the lives of Delhi’s sex workers

The book Spies from Space: The Isro Frame-up detailed how the real traitors in the Isro espionage case were CIA moles in India’s Intelligence Bureau. Is that why the book quickly disappeared from bookstores?

Grand Ambition with a Few Jarring Notes

Madhavankutty Pillai

Ranbir Singh Sidhu’s short stories are often pedestrian and spectacular at the same time

Love Stories Are Not Straight

Suhit Kelkar

This queer anthology questions labels such as ‘straight’ and ‘gay’ and, among other things, addresses the complications of love

An Absent Memory of a Community

Saaz Aggarwal

In her book, Sindh: Stories from a Vanished Homeland, Saaz Agarwal explores why the region continues to remain a collective blind spot of Partition, even for Sindhis who fled to India and then tried to erase it from memory. An extract:

Mahabharata Redux

Sandipan Deb

The Last War is a re-imagining of the great epic set in the Mumbai underworld. In the dead of night, a few hours before he and his brothers go to war against their cousins for control of the city’s largest crime empire, Jeet Kuru starts having doubts. But that old fox Kishenbhai will have none of it. Extracts from a new novel