novel

“Modi must provide an intellectual alternative”

S Prasannarajan

Aatish Taseer's new novel, The Way Things Were, is an Indian classic spanning the eventful decades between the Emergency and the advent of Modi, set in Lutyens' Delhi. The novelist in conversation with the Editor of Open magazine

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Ajit Duara

Mira Nair’s translation of Mohsin Hamid’s novel into cinema is riveting

Dan Brown’s Inferno

arindam

The publisher Double Day is printing four million copies of the book to start

The Illicit Happiness of Other People

Manu Joseph

Seventeen-year-old cartoonist Unni Chacko has jumped off a building. Nobody is able to explain why he did it. The only clues he has left behind are the cartoons and comics he has drawn, which his alcoholic father is trying to decipher. Extracts from Manu Joseph’s new novel

The Long and Short of a Story

Sohini Chattopadhyay

A novel is like building a house and a short story like furnishing a room, declares Anjum Hasan, who now has both under her belt

Missing the Plot

Arshia Sattar

Kunal Basu’s talent as a novelist lies well hidden in the complex maze he wanders through in this new book

Rhythm and Blues

Rahul Pandita

Jeet Thayil is a fine poet, and you see his talent in Narcopolis. But this is performance poetry masquerading as a novel

Experiments with the Novel

Tabish Khair

A mix of long fiction, travel writing, fictionalised autobiography and history, Rahul Bhattacharya fashions a different kind of a novel

Writer Unblocked

Aastha Atray Banan

Writing a Mills & Boon novel rekindled a romance in Aastha Atray Banan’s life—the one with words. For, it finally allowed her to let go of the fear of being judged as a writer

The Memory Game

Parvati Sharma

A favourite for the Man Booker prize this year, Alan Hollinghurst’s country house novel may appear oddly familiar to Indian readers of English literature