Sayantan Ghosh

This recommendation is unlike any before because this isn’t about a particular book, but two of her works – Happening and Simple Passion. It’s a great place to start if one were to be introduced to Ernaux’s vast body of work, most of which can be termed as autobiographical.

Arundhati Subramaniam marries the magical and the myriad, monsoon and Mumbai, myth and metaphors in nearly every page of this majestic collection of poems. Like every night has its own soundtrack, each piece here has a harmony unique to its own. And every time you return to them, it makes minute invisible readjustments to perfectly fit your state of mind.

One of the greatest joys of reading Naseeruddin Shah’s autobiography is that despite being one of the finest living actors in the world – to my mind, the finest ever – when he introduces the characters who feature in the book, he infuses those introductions with just unbridled warmth and admiration, and the occasional artistic envy.

Equal parts charming and eerie, most of the stories in the Ruskin Bond anthology titled A Season of Ghosts are delightfully entertaining.

Bear managed to shock readers and critics alike when it released in 1976, inviting both controversies and a cult following.

Sayaka Murata's characters start out as conventional people living ordinary lives like you and me. And then there appears a line, a turn of phrase, a fracture somewhere along the way, like a sudden curve on a mountain road that you on the driver's seat didn't anticipate, which sets you off on a freefall that often outlives the length of the book you're reading.

Garth Greenwell's masterful debut novel has a first-person narrator who teaches literature at the American College of Sofia, much like the writer himself once did. Any reader who's aware of this will sense from the very beginning that the line between reality and fiction is blurry in the pages that follow.

Missing children, wandering spirits, dead babies, vengeful ghosts, battered and abandoned human beings inhabit the world of this book. Argentine journalist, novelist, and short story writer Mariana Enriquez is in no mood to please, protect, or pander her readers or give them what they may be expecting from her.

Drinking in the northern part of India, where I have spent the past decade of my life, is a national sport. You drink with friends and acquaintances at house parties, you drink with journalists you've met for the first time over heated debates at rundown bars, you absolutely must drink at weddings, and you drink both to celebrate and mourn. I was once invited to a funeral dinner where the good late sir's favourite alcoholic beverage was part of the menu.

In his New York Times review of the book Geoff Dyer wrote, "I'm guessing that the potential readership for 'What I Talk About When I Talk About Running' is 70 percent Murakami nuts, 10 percent running enthusiasts and an overlapping 20 percent who will be on the brink of orgasm before they've even sprinted to the cash register."

Dominic Ullis, poet and addict, lover and loser, our drug-addled, desolate protagonist, burns in anguish throughout this hypnotic book after his wife hangs herself in the New Delhi apartment which they used to share – her lifeless swinging body waiting for him to come back home and find her.

Another year is over, not sure how – it was July just last week. So, here’s a small list of books that were adapted into lustrous and intricate screenplays for you to read/watch at the beginning of a new year.

There's one kind of pain that drips like untimely rain from above and then gradually percolates our skin to enter crevices inside us we didn't know existed. Then there's another kind which emanates from within the centre of our being like molten magma and erupts out of us leaving visible, corporeal marks on our flesh. This book, H is for Hawk, is that dazzling, volatile maestoso that exists at the meeting point of these two kinds.

Writing about bereavement can be the most arduous thing for any writer, especially if it’s a story of personal loss. After all, it’s laying bare the part of your soul that’s most assailable and tender, able to defy both rationality and expectations in the same breath. When writer Joan Didion’s husband suddenly collapses at their dinner table on a December evening, she sets out to do exactly that and changes the way grief memoirs are imagined and written forever. 

Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag is a novella that has crossed many borders and reached international shores after it was translated from the Kannada elegantly by Srinath Perur, but no amount of conversation around its genius shall ever be sufficient.

Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar won the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar for his debut novel, but it was in his second book The Adivasi Will Not Dance – this relentlessly readable collection of stories – that I felt he fully came into his own as a writer.

The great Margaret Atwood turns 83 today, November 18. To celebrate her on this occasion, we turn towards the quieter, more solemn and yet deliciously satisfying side of her – her poetry. To be a little more specific, her most recent collection of poems dedicated to her late partner and published in 2020 – Dearly.

There hasn't been a fifth of November ever since I first read V for Vendetta that I haven't thought of the phrase: "Remember, remember the fifth of November of gunpowder treason and plot." Hence, it only made sense that it is written about this week.

Anupama Chopra’s intimate and spirited biography of Khan, published in 2007 (which was also one of Khan’s most important years in films), finds the sweet spot between celebrating the actor and studying the rise of the quintessential song and dance Bollywood film into a global phenomenon.

Rounding up the Halloween month with one of the most visceral, terrifying novels ever written about the human race. This slim novel doesn’t waste any time and jumps straight into the story of Aoyama, a Tokyo-based documentary film-maker, who is leading an achingly solitary life after the death of his wife seven years ago.

The world has suddenly sat up and taken notice of contemporary Sri Lankan literature this week. No prizes for guessing that it’s because the most coveted literary prize, and arguably the most well-known, has been awarded to a Sri Lankan author.

What can be said about Gulzar that hasn’t already been said. Nearly every conversation among friends around poetry, the Urdu language or Hindi film songs—and sometimes even mundane details of life—tends to bring Gulzar’s name to our mind. It makes sense thus, that the story of Gulzar’s life unfolds before us in the form of a series of conversations with the author of this volume, Nasreen Munni Kabir.

It’s October already and officially Halloween month. Of course, the festival isn’t celebrated here in India, but thanks to pop culture infiltrations we are not far removed from it any longer. So, it only makes sense to read something that not only is an immersive experience but also sends a shiver down your spine this month.

The sequel to Andrew Sean Greer’s now celebrated novel Less released a few days ago to tremendous excitement worldwide. Less, which released to great acclaim in 2017, wasn’t an overnight success, but it went to win the Pulitzer Prize and found a wide readership eventually after coming out as a paperback. Pun unintended.

Earlier this week, author and poet Meena Kandasamy won the Hermann Kesten Prize given by the PEN Centre in Germany's Darmstadt – awarded annually to those who stand up for the rights of persecuted authors and journalists. Her entire body of work is so critical for every modern thinking reader to engage with, that one must not lose any opportunity to talk about it.

The Last White Man is a retelling of sorts of Kafka's The Metamorphosis for the post-Covid generation. In Mohsin Hamid's fifth and most recent novel, a white man wakes up on an otherwise ordinary morning and discovers that he has turned dark. However, unlike Kafka, Hamid refuses to plant his protagonist as an exception in this 'nightmare'.

Maverick Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka's second novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2022), originally published in India as Chats with the Dead in 2020, has just been shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize for Fiction. But his first book Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, his breakout work, remains the most inventive debut novel to have come out of the subcontinent in many years.

Early on during her visit to Kabul where the author Taran N Khan took up the task of training Afghan journalists, she is advised never to walk in the city. This is a book that begins with her defiance.

Guy Delisle is a French-Canadian cartoonist-cum-memoirist who travelled around Asia (accompanied mostly by his wife, an administrator with Doctors Without Borders), and created four timeless graphic travelogues based on his experiences in North Korea, China, Israel, and, of course, Burma. This is about Burma Chronicles.

If a book can fill you with tenderness after you've laughed and cried with it for 200-odd pages, then it's a book worth remembering, revisiting. Akhil Sharma's Family Life is one of them.