You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
When sunlight presses,/Upon this verse,/The world reverses,/Green doves on grey grass. Insight Yellow Hibiscus by award-winning poet Rukmini Bhaya Nair brings together some of her best published poetry along with several new verses written over the past few years. If freedom, pain, death and memory are the universal themes that run through Immortals the first section of the book animals and insects, places, and passion for language are at the core of the others. The subtle, ironical insights into the fallibility of human nature that Nair offers us in these poems finely complement her eloquence and lyrical facility. Never afraid to experiment with words and ideas, she explores here the complexities of gender and politics in an unusual and often striking manner. Brilliantly conceived and beautifully executed, the poems in this volume render the anguish and yearning of life in a powerful and original voice.
In this elegantly written and theoretically sophisticated work, Rukmini Bhaya Nair asks why human beings across the world are such compulsive and inventive storytellers. Extending current research in cognitive science and narratology, she argues that we seem to have a genetic drive to fabricate as a way of gaining the competitive advantages such fictions give us. She suggests that stories are a means of fusing causal and logical explanations of 'real' events with emotional recognition, so that the lessons taught to us as children, and then throughout our lives via stories, lay the cornerstones of our most crucial beliefs. Nair's conclusion is that our stories really do make us up, just as much as we make up our stories.
In this impressive collection of poems, Rukmini Bhaya Nair weaves together complex strands of mythology, history and contemporary reality to produce poetry that is richly allusive, lyrical and uncompromising. The eponymous cantos in the first section are in ironic meditation upon a significant moment of our timesýthe destruction of the Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992. Skilfully moving between the planes of myth and history, Nair crafts a national allegory that demonstrates not only brilliance of conception, but also throws up a strikingly new perspective on this event. Almost each page speaks of imaginative power and profound insights as the poemsý protagonistsýVishnu, Hanuman and Sitaýe...
What terms are currently up for debate in Indian society? How have their meanings changed over time? This book highlights key words for modern India in everyday usage as well as in scholarly contexts. Encompassing over 250 key words across a wide range of topics, including aesthetics and ceremony, gender, technology and economics, past memories and future imaginaries, these entries introduce some of the basic concepts that inform the 'cultural unconscious' of the Indian subcontinent in order to translate them into critical tools for literary, political, cultural and cognitive studies. Inspired by Raymond Williams' pioneering exploration of English culture and society through the study of key...
What happens when cultures collide? When poets and angels clash? Driven by voices in her head and visions of angelhood, Pari is the heroine of this extraordinary novel. Part detective story, part literary history and part romance, this is the tale of a paranoid schizophrenic child-woman who is seduced-ike many others-by a language and culture not 'ours'. Rukmini Bhaya Nair skillfully weaves together the lives of Pari, Sylvia Plath, William Blake and D.H. Lawrence to create a carefully layered story that flashes between past, present and future, held together by a thread of love, longing and the treasures of literature.
Essays examine the poetic stances assumed by 'terror' in relation to nation, language, translation, borders, gender, sexuality, and other forms of 'difference'.
Awarded the 2023 "René Wellek Prize for the Best Edited Essay Collection" by the American Comparative Literature Association, Migrating Minds contributes to the prominent interdisciplinary domain of Cosmopolitan Studies with 20 innovative essays by humanities scholars from all over the world that re-examine theories and practices of cosmopolitanism from a variety of perspectives. The volume satisfies the need for a stronger involvement of Comparative and World Literatures and Cultures, Translation, and Education Theories in this crucial debate, and also proposes an experimental way to explore in depth the necessity of a cosmopolitan method as well as the riches of cosmopolitan representatio...
A New York Times Notable Book: “A ravishingly seductive novel . . . set in contemporary Kathmandu” (Elle). Ramchandra is a math teacher earning a low wage and living in a small apartment with his wife and two children. Moonlighting as a tutor, he engages in an illicit affair with one of his tutees, Malati, a beautiful, impoverished teenager, who is also a new mother. She provides for him what his wife, who comes from a privileged background, does not: desire, mystery, and a simpler life. Just as this Nepalese city struggles with the conflicts of change, Ramchandra must also learn to accommodate both tradition and his very modern desires, in this “gripping” novel by the Whiting Award...
'Soaked in the Bible, in Sanskrit, in mid twentieth-century English poetry and his own lifelong reading habits, Vijay Nambisan was a great Indian poet who never received his due. His magisterial later poems are of a piece with the earliest, which is rare. It is infuriating that he is unknown to most Indians. This book is a treasure and a cathedral.'--JEET THAYIL 'In Vijay's intelligent, self-aware meditations on mortality and human folly in this final and complete volume of his poems, readers will come to as close an apprehension of the nature of epiphany as is possible--to those sudden illuminations of the spirit that can, without warning, light up flares in our dull, corporeal bodies. [The...