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Shashi Tharoor is once again at his provocative best. In the title essay, we learn the steep price paid by some Iraqis just to obtain a book; what does it mean when selling books, essentially selling culture, out of one's own library is the only way to put bread on the table? Later, Tharoor reminisces about growing up with books in India and the central position of classics like the Mahabharata in developing his own literary identity. The poignant homage to Chilean poet Pablo Neruda recalls his...

Most studies of Chinese literature conflate the category of the future with notions of progress and nation building, and with the utopian visions broadcast by the Maoist and post-Mao developmental state. The future is thus understood as a preconceived endpoint that is propagated, at times even imposed, by a center of power. By contrast, Tales of Futures Past introduces "anticipation"-the expectations that permeate life as it unfolds-as a lens through which to reexamine the textual, institutional...

An anthology of international authors from the Pacific region, this book presents new work that includes over a dozen avant-garde poets from China, gathered by American poet and translator Artur Sze. Highlights include untranslated work by Ravindranath Tagore, and new fiction from Hong Kong.

The nineteenth century in Bengal has been identified and then reviled as a period of renaissance or false renaissance. This study moves beyond those sterile parameters to provide a new understanding of the interactive, living, and cataclysmic nature of events. Analysing certain cultural turning points in the history of Bengali literature, it investigates the place of the aesthetic, the political, and the collective in the composition of a literary culture to show the relevance and significance o...

Chinese Writing Today is an anthology of contemporary Chinese poetry, prose and essays taken from the literary journal Jintian (Today). Jintian has been the foremost voice of contemporary Chinese writing since its inception on "The Democracy Wall" in Beijing in 1978, and its subsequent reinvention in 1989. This is the third volume in the series and the first undertaken by a U.S. publisher. Authors include Bei Dao, Gao Er Tai, Yang Lian, and Zhu Wen-names that will only continue to grow in import...

The book presented here is the first work of Western literary criticism to examine the Hindi laghukatha - a modern Indian prose genre that has been published since the 1970s in Hindi newspapers and magazines and is characterised by its concise form (500 words on average) and socio-political agenda. The importance of the genre within the Hindi literary scene lies in the fact that the laghukatha is based on indigenous genres which have been modernised, whereas the Hindi short story and the novel a...

This is an anthology of the best and most representative verse in translations that recreate the spirit of the originals. The selections range from the early pioneers in western-style poetry to the living poets.

In this ground-breaking interdisciplinary study of terrorism, insurgency and the literature of colonial India, Alex Tickell re-envisages the political aesthetics of empire. Organized around key crisis moments in the history of British colonial rule such as the 'Black Hole' of Calcutta, the anti-thug campaigns of the 1830s, the 1857 Rebellion, anti-colonial terrorism in Edwardian London and the Amritsar massacre in 1919, this timely book reveals how the terrorizing threat of violence mutually def...