When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife
Meena Kandasamy
Meena Kandasamy has a sharp antenna for injustice. In her debut novel, Gypsy Goddess (2014), she wrote about the exploitation of Dalits, anchoring it in a Christmas day massacre at Kilvenmani village in 1968, her rage about inequalities evident. Her books of poems ( Touch , Ms. Militancy ) are searing commentaries on caste, class, love, sex, life. In 2012, in an emotional piece on her broken marriage with an abusive husband, Kandasamy wondered if she could overcome the nightmare. Five years on, Kandasamy has taken “responsibility over my own life;” she has written her story. Read the full review here .
Gandhi: An Impossible Possibility
Sudhir Chandra
Structured in four sections, this study—of mainly the last years of Gandhi—revolves around the identifiable themes of public ethics, nationalism, truth, ahimsa , empathy, civic life, and the semiotics of private-public moral acts. But to the present reviewer, the striking axis of the book consists of the attempt to understand the formation and sustenance of moral leadership and its requirement and therein its difficulties, or rather impossibility, of creating its political constituency. Read the full review here .
Nobody Killed Her
Sabyn Javeri
In a manner more crude, but equally effective, was the bomber really the Jack Ruby who killed the gunman Lee Harvey Oswald who killed JFK? For that’s what leads to the perfect crime, one where all evidence of the assassin is wiped out almost as soon as his bullet left his gun, and allows for the title of Pakistani author Sabyn Javeri’s riveting novel Nobody Killed Her . Read the full review here .
The Other Man
Shashank Kela
It is a thick choreography of police, judiciary, administration, politicians, priests, corporates, parties, informers, lawyers, media, activists—all emerging from the shadows and returning to the shadows even as they dance the charade of a barely functional state. Shashank Kela’s is a brave effort to write fiction in the face of facts. Read the full review here .
Fairy Tales for the Disillusioned: Enchanted Stories from the French Decadent Tradition
Edited by Gretchen Schultz and Lewis Seifert
This collection is the result of a long fascination with the genre of fairy tales known in France as the conte de fées and written in times of crisis and transition. The end of the 19th century saw revolutions and regime changes in France, which gave rise to a cynical reaction against the decadence of the years 1870 to 1914. Read the full review here .
The Color of Our Sky
Amita Trasi
Amita Trasi’s debut novel The Color of Our Sky oscillates between being a bildungsroman of sorts and a commentary on society. It is an ambitious book that tries very hard to take on a number of things: the devadasi system, child trafficking, life in a brothel, HIV/AIDS, the Mumbai terror attacks, dysfunctional families, complicated love. Read the full review here .
