Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s latest historical fiction Independence (HarperCollins India) is the story of the three Ganguly sisters, who see India through their own lens and desires, in the backdrop of India’s Independence, the Partition and the political and social upheaval.
Set in a village near Kolkata, this compelling page-turner is also abo...
Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi, India’s first winner of the Pritzker Prize — considered to be the architecture’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize — passed away on Tuesday at the age of 95. The architect, urbanist and educator, who has been awarded the Padma Vibhushan posthumously, leaves behind an enviable legacy that will be onerous for modern architects...
On the first day of the new year, the International Monetary Fund chief Kristalina Georgieva told American television network CBS that one-third of the global economy will face recession in 2023. “Even countries that are not in recession, it would feel like recession for hundreds of millions of people,” she said. Meanwhile, massive tech layoffs are...
Cells are not just small structures that link together to make a complex organism. In Siddhartha Mukherjee’s book, they come alive, like members of a family, some quirky, some sedate, some angry, some cooperative, some downright recalcitrant
Off-the-beaten-path destinations in India saw a spike in tourists interest in 2022, with places like Madhapur, Telangana; Rameswaram and Vellore in Tamil Nadu; Cherrapunji, Meghalaya; and Pimpri-Chinchwad, Maharashtra; being the top-trending spots, according to data released by Airbnb on Monday (January 23).
International travel saw a strong rec...
It’s never enough to tell their stories, no matter how many times they have been told: they were told before, and will be told again. The tales of their incredible valour, resistance and sacrifice run through the veins of pre-Independent India’s history, and throb across its pages, despite attempts by the mainstream historiographers to reduce them ...
For someone who won the Academy Award for Best Director in two consecutive years (Birdman, The Revenant), Alejandro G. Iñárritu had his latest film, Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, quietly dropped on Netflix last month. Reasons? For starters, its elliptical narrative, slipping in and out of surreal sequences and verbose exchanges ste...
The Latin American literature boom of the 1960s and 1970s, led by Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), Carlos Fuentes (Mexico) and Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru), changed the contours of world literature in unprecedented ways. The publication of Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), the multi-generational saga of the Buendía family set in the fi...
As a reader of fiction, oftentimes you yearn to travel, vicariously, to a somewhere place, a place that takes you away from the monotony of the familiar to the strangeness of the unseen and the unfamiliar. A place where the physical and the metaphysical, the mythical and the magical coalesce, unravelling worlds upon worlds. The fictional universe o...
In Trial By Fire, the accomplished new Netflix show centered on the horrific Uphaar Cinema fire tragedy, each episode opens with a timestamp, mapping out the distance from the day the incident occurred. In episode two, we witness proceedings unfolding two weeks since the mishap. From thereon, the temporal width keeps expanding episodically, touchin...
Spare, the explosive, tell-all memoir by Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, has hogged the headlines for more reasons than one, ever since it hit the shelves on the midnight of January 10: from the sibling rivalry with his elder brother Prince William to his memories of the death of his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales; from his experiments with coc...
The 68-year-old British novelist and screenwriter may not be able to hold a pen or walk again after he suffered a debilitating fall in Rome on December 26, he wrote on Twitter on Saturday
Tintin, the best-known boy reporter, was introduced to the world in a cartoon strip on January 10, 1929. For over nine decades, the globetrotting star of 24 books by Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi, who wrote under the pseudonym of Hergé, has defied time, language and culture. His popularity has transcended his birthplace in Brussels and reac...
Queeny Pradhan's book is a path-breaking account of the lives of some of India’s queens who, despite their limitations, stood up to what was then the world’s most powerful and inhuman colonising force
'Ratan Tata: A Life' by Thomas Mathew will be published by HarperCollins on March 30. Harper won the keenly contested global auction in January last year; the acquisition created a record in the history of non-fiction publishing in India
Badri Seshadri, who runs publishing house Kizhakku Pathippagam, comes from a corporate background; what drove him to take up Tamil publishing, with its multitude of challenges?
The classical art forms have been at the centre of allegations of Brahminical dominance and discrimination for long. The Federal traces five flash points in their history
Thomas Abraham
Managing Director,
Hachette India
The pandemic year of 2020 was a disaster for most publishers simply from the fact that we had four months of zero sales. Unlike the West where book sales grew by leaps and bound during lockdowns, we had the reverse effect because books were not allowed to be sold—not being considered essential g...
Certain destinations at home and some countries close by have been the eternal favourites of Indian travellers over the years. The year 2022 was no different, say media reports. However, many are now looking beyond the obvious and exploring more exotic and faraway locations, bringing newer destinations to the most-travelled-to lists of the year.
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At its core, British director Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin, which is leading the Golden Globe Awards with eight nominations and tipped to win big at the 2023 Academy Awards, is a profoundly evocative tale of two former best friends — both of whom most of us ‘older folks’ will understand because we probably were one or the other at o...
1. Nireeswaran by V.J. James, translated from Malayalam by Ministhy S. (Penguin Random House India): In his third novel to be translated into English — close on the heels of his last work, Anti-Clock, which tackled the big questions of life and death — celebrated Malayalam novelist and short story writer V.J. James proposes the idea of the un-god t...
Kartiki Gonsalves’ The Elephant Whisperers, which has been shortlisted for the 95th Academy Award in the Documentary Short Film category, opens with a charming bit of narrative trickery. The setting is Tamil Nadu’s Theppakadu Elephant Camp, one of the oldest in Asia, and the man in the frame is Bomman, an inhabitant of the indigenous Kattuanayakan ...
From the reintroduction of cheetahs in the country to the clamour over 'Hindi-imposition' to climate change, here’s how N Ponnappa’s cartoons captured India’s milieu in 2022
