Anant, a thirty-five-year-old small-time photographer in Ahmedabad, has a recurring nightmare. In it, a three-legged bitch is chained to his ankle, slowing his step and dragging angrily behind him. Try as he might, he is neither able to free himself of the mongrel in the dream nor the dream itself. What does the dog signify? Raashee, his one-time lover who now exists only in online chat windows? Or Diane Arbus, the legendary 1960s' photographer whose groundbreaking ideas have no takers in ...

An extraordinary account of ordinary people in troubled times In 2001, a calamitous earthquake struck Gujarat. A year later came the kind of communal carnage the nation had not seen since the Partition. For Robin David, then an assistant editor with the Times of India, the two events engendered a tectonic shift in his own life. The earthquake left deep cracks in his ancestral home, while the riots undermined all the certainties of life, making it impossible to walk through hitherto familia...

Cool Rules introduces the reader to a new cultural category. While the authors do not claim to have discovered Cool, they believe they are the first to attempt a serious, systematic analysis of Cool’s history, psychology, and importance.The contemporary Cool attitude is barely 50 years old, but its roots are older than that. Cool Rules traces Cool’s ancient origins in European, Asian, and African cultures, its prominence in the African-American jazz scene of the 1...

This book provides a view of literary life under the Nazis, highlighting the ambiguities, rivalries and conflicts that determined the cultural climate of that period and beyond. Focusing on a group of writers – in particular, Hans Grimm, Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer, Wilhelm Schäfer, Emil Strauß, Börries Freiherr von Münchhausen and Rudolf Binding – it examines the continuities in völkisch-nationalist thought in Germany from c. 1890 into the post-war period and the ways in which vö...

Non-fans regard Céline Dion as ersatz and plastic, yet to those who love her, no one could be more real, with her impoverished childhood, her (creepy) manager-husband's struggle with cancer, her knack for howling out raw emotion. There's nothing cool about Céline Dion, and nothing clever. That's part of her appeal as an object of love or hatred - with most critics and committed music fans taking pleasure (or at least geeky solace) in their lofty contempt. This book documents Carl Wilson's ...

**The iconic masterpiece of India that introduced the world to “a glittering novelist—one with startling imaginative and intellectual resources, a master of perpetual storytelling” (The New Yorker)WINNER OF THE BEST OF THE BOOKERS • SOON TO BE A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIESSelected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time • The fortieth anniversary edition, featuring a new introduction by the author**Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of m...

**New York Times Best SellerLonglisted for the Man Booker PrizeNamed a Best Book of 2017 by NPR, Amazon, Kirkus, The Washington Post, Newsday, and the Hudson GroupA dazzling, richly moving new novel by the internationally celebrated author of The God of Small Things**The Ministry of Utmost Happiness takes us on an intimate journey of many years across the Indian subcontinent—from the cramped neighborhoods of Old Delhi and th...

From the fiery intellectual provocateur— and one of our most fearless advocates of gender equality—a brilliant, urgent essay collection that both celebrates modern feminism and challenges us to build an alliance of strong women and strong men.Ever since the release of her seminal first book, Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia has remained one of feminism’s most outspoken, independent, and searingly intelligent voices. Now, for the first time, her best essays on the subject ar...

Accessible, entertaining, anecdotal. A good introduction to issues in contemporary civics as well as a measured and thoughtful response to major themes and figures in cultural studies.Civility in politics is a subject throughout, and analyses of both Obama's rhetoric and the use of lowest-common-denominator insults in public debate will be well-timed going into the 2012 election campaignNot just formal essays: some are dialogues, some personal meditations, some direct addre...

Winner of the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award, Kiran Desai’s extraordinary novel of love and loss, now reissued with a new introduction by the authorPublished to astonishing acclaim, The Inheritance of Loss heralds Kiran Desai as one of our most insightful novelists. In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas, an embittered judge wants only to retire in peace when his orphaned grand...

In this impressively researched and incisive book, Bruce Grierson draws on over three hundred stories of so-called "U-turners," who have risked their livelihoods to answer a sudden wake-up call. We meet people who change political parties and careers, doctors who quit to become poets, men who become women, people who suddenly become revolutionaries for a cause they didn't care about the day before. In chapters that address everything from the neuroscience behind epiphanies to the possibili...

**National Book Award FinalistWinner of the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction AwardWinner of the American Academy of Arts & Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation AwardWinner of the Anisfield-Wolf AwardWinner of the Bard Fiction PrizeOne of the New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of the YearOne of Granta’s Best Young American NovelistsA Washington Post Notable Fiction Book of the YearPEN Cente...