Book World Central

The Shape of the Beast is our world laid bare, with great courage, passion and eloquence, by a mind that has engaged unhesitatingly with its changing realities, often anticipating the way things have moved in the last decade.In the fourteen interviews collected here, conducted between January 2001 and March 2008, Arundhati Roy examines the nature of state and corporate power as it has emerged during this period, and the shape that resistance movements are taking. As she speaks, among other things, about people displaced by dams and industry, the genocide in Gujarat, Maoist rebels, the war in Kashmir and the global War on Terror, she raises fundamental questions about democracy, justice and non-violent protest. Read the rest of this entry »

In the sixtieth year of India’s independence, best-selling author Shobhaa Dé turns sixty as well. In a departure from anything else she has written, in Superstar India , the first big ‘India’ book by a woman, she tells the story of what our nation is all about in a way that has never been told before.

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Everyone has their secrets. In her stunning new collection of stories, Jhumpa Lahiri gently lifts the veil to reveal how even the most ordinary lives have their dramas and tragedies and then, as gently, lets it fall back down again. A middle-aged man discovers that the death of his wife opens up his world in unexpected ways, his daughter worries that she will now have to look after him but finds that the tables, in fact, have turned; a housewife falls in love with a family friend, her child ascertains her secret years on; a young man and woman whose lives cross over the years, finally and fatedly fall in love.

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