Hindi writer Nirmal Verma’s stories from the 1960s give us people in love with loneliness

Continuing our series on all-but-forgotten books with a journey through Verma’s ‘The World Elsewhere and Other Stories’.

Oindrila Mukherjee

· Aug 04, 2018 · 05:30 pm

To read this novel from 1940 is to read an elegy to love and longing in an older Delhi

In his 1940 novel ‘Twilight in Delhi’, Ahmed Ali situates both desire and sadness in a city that lives now in the memories of its characters.

Oindrila Mukherjee

· May 19, 2018 · 05:30 pm

Mukul Kesavan’s time-travelling photographer tells an unorthodox story of the Partition

In his 1994 novel ‘Looking Through Glass’, the historian and writer uses magical realism in fiction to depict a saga we’re all familiar with.

Oindrila Mukherjee

· Apr 28, 2018 · 03:30 pm

In Abraham Verghese’s deeply moving tale about friendship, tennis is both a comfort and a metaphor

‘The Tennis Partner’, published in 1998, is the perfect read before (and after) the Wimbledon final.

Oindrila Mukherjee

· Jul 16, 2017 · 06:30 pm

It’s too soon to forget this warm, charming novel about an underdog in big, lonely Mumbai

We dusted our copy of ‘Arzee the Dwarf’ to revisit a three-foot something protagonist who’s waiting for ‘the age of Arzee’. Alas, trouble lies ahead.

Oindrila Mukherjee

· Jul 08, 2017 · 07:00 am

If you love Indian graphic novels, don’t forget the one that came at the beginning

Weird people with weirder obsessions made for the weirdest cocktail of stories.

Oindrila Mukherjee

· May 20, 2017 · 08:30 am

The first autobiographical novel by an Indian woman writing in English was both beautiful and profound

Krupabai Satthianadhan’s ‘Saguna’, which appeared in 1887, was largely autobiographical.

Oindrila Mukherjee

· Feb 06, 2016 · 08:30 am

What English mathematicians thought of the ‘Hindoo calculator’

Revisiting ‘The Indian Clerk’, David Leavitt’s bionovel of the mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan.

Oindrila Mukherjee

· Jan 23, 2016 · 08:30 am

Why India's shape-shifting folk stories need to be read all over again

AK Ramanujan’s ‘Folktakes from India’ could be the starting point for reading Indian fiction in 2016.

Oindrila Mukherjee

· Jan 03, 2016 · 08:30 am

The Indian diaspora fiction that you really should be reading

Nina McConigley’s ‘Cowboys and East Indians’ captures immigrants’ experiences sensitively but without literary angst.

Oindrila Mukherjee

· Nov 22, 2015 · 01:30 pm

Why Mahesh Dattani will start afresh and not fade away

The playwright’s ‘Me and My Plays’ is his own definitive statement in more ways than one.

Oindrila Mukherjee

· Oct 10, 2015 · 08:30 am

Vikram Chandra’s ‘Love and Longing in Bombay’: Where potboilers meet literature

Continuing our series on books that were famous in their day but aren’t read often now

Oindrila Mukherjee

· Sep 05, 2015 · 02:30 pm