Sampurna Chattarji

Ela is a happy child with everything she could wish for, until her thirteenth birthday when she discovers she is an adopted kid. The story is about how she copes with this new knowledge. A Children's Bookshelf Selection: Each month our editor's pick the best books for children and young adults by age to be a part of the children's bookshelf. These are editorial recommendations made by our team of experts. Our monthly reading list includes a mix of bestsellers and top new releases and evergreen books that will help enhance a child's reading life.

ELA !

'It is hard for me to say the word "stench" when I speak of her, my love . . .' The stories in Dirty Love are set in the restless swirl of a Bombay where dream-shuttles speed through the rain and men fall prey to dirty love. Reeking of sewers, fish markets, slaughtered meat, and peopled with loners, misfits and drifters, these tales prise open the surface of everyday existence.

Dirty Love

Anjum Hasan

Chattarji

This anthology brings together one hundred contemporary Indian poets and fiction writers working in English as well as translating from other Indian languages. Located anywhere from Michigan to Mumbai, the sources of their creativity range from the ancient epics to twentieth-century world literature, with themes suggesting a modernist individuality and sense of displacement as well as an ironic, postmodern embracing of multiple disjunctions. The editors present a historical background to the various Englishes apparent in this collection, while also identifying the shared traditions and contexts that hold together their uniquely diverse selection. In aiming at coherence rather than unity, Hasan and Chattarji reveal that the idea of Indianness is as much a means of exploring difference as finding common ground.

Contemporary Indian Writing

Future Library

‘It is hard for me to say the word “stench” when I speak of her, my love . . .’ The stories in Dirty Love are set in the restless swirl of a Bombay where dream-shuttles speed through the rain and men fall prey to dirty love. Reeking of sewers, fish markets, slaughtered meat, and peopled with loners, misfits and drifters, these tales prise open the surface of everyday existence.

Sight May Strike You Blind

How do you stop yourself from being blown away all the way to China? How do you get top-notch services out of snooty Turkish bath attendants? Why do camels not have wings? As thirteen-year-old Shashank the Sad pores over his math homework, a little doodle appears and Mulla Nasruddin—MN to his friends—comes alive! MN’s never-ending stream of stories enthralls Shashank but make him wonder if his new friend is completely crazy. Then one day, Shashank finds himself trapped in a magic grid. Is there a connection between MN’s madcap stories and Shashank’s way out of the grid? Taking the much-loved tales of Mulla Nasruddin into a young boy’s richly imaginative world, Sampurna Chattarji’s retelling is one that will entertain and move both adults and children alike.

(Tales of Wit and Wisdom)

Mullah Nasruddin

Boldly playful, ingenious, associative and mercurial, Sampurna Chattarji's new poems careen through varied terrain, geographic and linguistic, in a dizzy journey of defamiliarization, as the alien protagonist, Space Gulliver, extends and challenges habitual ideas of what constitutes the mundane. In the process, she proceeds to recover for herself the sense of 'first-time-ness', the art of being 'vulnerable to every body that rests against mine, vulnerable to the word "eagle", the idea of the scar that the knife has left around the heart'. She also recovers the art of living on the edge - 'a good place to sit when you wish/ to regard the world you had insanely loved/ and now feel only a puzzled affection for'. Here is a book that blends intellectual enquiry, a taste for whimsy and a love of language into challenging and audacious poetry. - ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM Poet and editor The work is a joy to read. I found myself moved and delighted by its various aspects: reports on the cathedral in its changing moods, the diary-like pieces and the Space Gulliver poems. For me, the cathedral poems were a lovely place to start. I was very affected by the way the building kept glancing into sight, reflecting the season and the way a person comes upon it. The way the poems turned the corner made a remote site real. The diary pieces were more real, uncannily so at times, as events that I sometimes recognized came into a wandering written form. The shifts from poems to prose were quite thrilling, full pages dropping into almost emptied spaces. For me, though, the real pleasure in this set came with the beautiful revolutions of the Space Gulliver poems. What worked was precisely the way the poet kept working the line and the voice, so that with each poem new resources emerged. I began by admiring this as a practice but gradually, as the voice and its commitments developed, I found myself simply taken by the language and what it had become able to do. Something quite remarkable starts to happen at some point in this sequence so that by the end the reader - this reader anyway - is fully enfolded in Space Gulliver's world. - DAVID HERD Poet and professor of Modern Literature, University of Kent

Sampurna Chattarji

About

Books

Join the club