Fiction

What if the afterlife is no glamorous inferno, celestial paradise or reincarnation lottery but a bureaucratic nightmare, overfull and under-resourced, where you remember your death but have a second one to look forward to after a fresh round of ageing and disease? Worst of all, what if you had to get a job there – manufacturing umbrellas, say – in order to pay for basic goods and drink away your woes as it dawns on you that nobody in this realm knows what’s going on?Steve Toltz’s fabulously impressive third novel,…

Devil House begins with a proposal from true crime author Gage Chandler’s editor: a property is for sale in the California town of Milpitas. Abandoned after a spell as a pornographic book and video shop, it subsequently became the site of a little known, possibly occult double murder. The deadly weapon was a sword, and this was 1987: the peak of the satanic panic, when devil worship was supposedly rife and lurking in the grooves of every heavy metal record. Why doesn’t Gage move in, investigate the murders and write his…

Although more famous for being an Oscar-winning filmmaker, Satyajit Ray's written works are treasure-troves of Bengal's literary history, particularly in the genres of crime thriller, fantasy and science fiction. While many may be well acquainted with Ray's written characters like Feluda and Professor Shonku, in a recently released book written by Satyajit Ray titled Travails With The Alien, The Film That Was Never Made and Other Adventures with Science Fiction, readers can now access the full script of his doomed…

In what is going to mark the debut of former US President Bill Clinton as a fiction writer, he has teamed up with James Patterson and their thriller, rich in "information that only a former Commander-in-Chief could know" will be released globally on Monday (June 4). The much anticipated novel is titled The President is Missing and is being published by Penguin Random House. "Yes, The President is Missing is fiction -- it's a thriller -- but James Patterson and I have come up with three of the most frightening…

She writes poetic prose, employs redolent metaphors and evokes utmost admiration for her novelistic virtues. Arundhati Roy is anything but a boring author. The 1997 Booker Prize-winner, who is equally at ease writing scathing essays, says she is a "disciplined writer" whose heart lies in fiction as it is a "connective tissue" between many things which are sometimes looked at or studied in isolation. "Much of my non-fiction writing is an argument, but fiction is where you create a universe through which you…

This month is full of literary treats for Indian bookworms as critically acclaimed authors like Arundhati Roy and Amitav Ghosh are slated to publish their works. Apart from their books, there will be a plethora of book releases on topics ranging from mythology, crime to fiction and climate change. Here is a list of books that you may want to consider adding to your bookshelves in June. 1.My Seditious Heart: A collection of Arundhati Roy's non-fiction writings, My Seditious Heart is a book that follows the…

Editor’s note: New Delhi MP Meenakshi Lekhi makes her debut as a fiction writer with her latest book, The New Delhi Conspiracy. Co-authored by Lekhi and Krishna Kumar, the book, a political thriller, was launched on Friday by BJP MP JP Nadda at NCUI Auditorium & Convention Centre, New Delhi. The book is a work of fiction and claims to be adventurous and intriguing and begins with the death of a scientist, who warns a woman politician in New Delhi about the impending danger to the life of Raghav Mohan, the…

How do you capture the realities of climate change in a novel — not just its causes and symptoms, but the ever-changing, ever-weirder ways it is manifesting, within the conventional framework of a story with a beginning, middle and end? Answering that question is, according to the writer Amitav Ghosh, the literary world’s great challenge. “I feel completely convinced that we have to change our fictional practices in order to deal with the world that we’re in,” he said. “Something this big and this important,…

From Feluda created by Satyajit Ray to Byomkesh Bakshi written by Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay, most of the iconic detective characters of Indian literature are more than half a century old. In fact, in recent times, little has been done in the detective or crime thrillers genre, and one of the only worthy addition to the clan of world-class detective inspectors from India-- the likes of Inspector Rebus and Hercule Poirot -- that comes to mind is Anita Nair's character, Inspector Borei Gowda. In the last decade, Borei…

Recently unveiled letters from TS Eliot to his muse Emily Hale show how much he loved his longtime friend, but a statement from beyond the grave by the poet himself dismisses his feelings and shows how Eliot tries to rewrite the narrative of their relationship, scholars say. Hale donated Eliot's letters to Princeton University Library more than 60 years ago with instructions that they could only be opened 50 years after she and Eliot died. The day they were made available at the Ivy League school, Eliot's…