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HT reviewer Thangkhanlal Ngaihte picks his favourite reads of 2021
Published on Dec 17, 2021 02:41 PM IST
On the dreaded past and the precarious present: Fascism, democracy, India’s relationship with its northeastern states and local memoirs
Thangkhalal Ngaihte
HT reviewer Percy Bharucha picks his favourite reads of 2021
Weaving between satire and surrealism: A novel that evokes a childish sense of joy in exploring the uncertain
Updated on Dec 17, 2021 02:44 PM IST
Percy Bharucha
HT reviewer Lamat R Hasan picks her favourite reads of 2021
Saleem Kidwai’s translations of Qurratulain Hyder’s novels bring out the author’s command over the Urdu idiom
Updated on Dec 17, 2021 02:37 PM IST
Lamat R Hasan
HT reviewer Suhit Kelkar picks his favourite read of 2021
Running through every coppice: Pascale Petit’s ecopoetry opens up the reader to remorse, compassion, hope, and perhaps Nature within us
Updated on Dec 17, 2021 02:31 PM IST
Suhit Kelkar
HT reviewer Farzana Versey picks her favourite read of 2021
About words, said and unsaid: Of storytelling that takes the reader to the heart of characters, to their acceptance or denial of identity, and to their exploitation and predation.
Updated on Dec 17, 2021 03:50 PM IST
Farzana Versey
HT reviewer KX Ronnie picks his favourite reads of 2021
The comfort of worlds unfamiliar: Dragons, mermaids, goblins and gods and reflections on class and desire in 1780s London
Updated on Dec 17, 2021 02:21 PM IST
KX Ronnie
HT reviewer Huzan Tata picks her favourite reads of 2020
Historical women in the spotlight: The last queen of the Sikh empire and a feminist take on an Indian epic
Updated on Dec 17, 2021 01:28 PM IST
Huzan Tata
HT reviewer Syed Saad Ahmed picks his favourite reads of 2021
Obsessively reading travelogues and books on natural history as a consequence of being homebound and attempting to grasp the Earth’s obtusely vast timescale
Updated on Dec 17, 2021 01:23 PM IST
Syed Saad Ahmed
HT reviewer Mahmood Farooqui picks his favourite read of 2021
The give and take that created Indo-Muslim culture; how the verses of Rumi and Sadi found a new avatar as dohas in India’s Persianate Age
Updated on Dec 17, 2021 01:17 PM IST
Mahmood Farooqui
HT reviewer Sonali Mujumdar picks her favourite reads of 2021
Rediscovering an old gem; A short epistolary novel written in 1912 features the coming-of-age tale of an orphan. The author Jean Webster, who also happened to be Mark Twain’s grand-niece, wrote more than half a dozen novels before she died at 40
Updated on Dec 17, 2021 12:56 PM IST
Sonali Mujumdar
HT reviewer Simar Bhasin picks her favourite reads of 2021
Where the future became an ending; an exposition of a world order that posits itself as a liberal force while sticking to hierarchies
Updated on Dec 17, 2021 12:48 PM IST
Simar Bhasin
HT reviewer Chintan Girish Modi picks his favourite reads of 2021
Doing their best to survive; Sonal Kohli’s short stories are snapshots of lives that are made and unmade by marriage, war, miscarriage, widowhood, genocide, disability, and economic misfortunes
Updated on Dec 17, 2021 12:49 PM IST
Chintan Girish Modi
HT reviewer Nawaid Anjum picks his favourite reads of 2021
A dialogue across time with Lady Chatterley: Canadian-British author Alison MacLeod’s book fuses fact and fiction in a joyous celebration of DH Lawrence’s most controversial novel
Updated on Dec 17, 2021 12:36 PM IST
Nawaid Anjum
Lilly Singh introduces her book club that celebrates South Asian stories
Priyanka Chopra can't keep calm as Indo-Canadian sensation Lilly Singh now has her own book club ‘Lilly's Library’ that promises ‘juicy gup shup’ with ‘some literary drama’ and we too can't wait for its first book announcement
Updated on Dec 10, 2021 07:57 PM IST
Zarafshan Shiraz, Delhi
HT Picks; New Reads
This week’s list of interesting reads includes a journalistic memoir of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War by the first reporter to cover it, a book on Aligarh Muslim University and its role in the making of the modern Indian Muslim, and a narrative of how lives are lived in the villages of Bihar
Published on Dec 10, 2021 04:08 PM IST
HT Team
Interview: Kanya D’Almeida, winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2021 - “I ask my characters endless questions”
The Sri Lankan author and journalist says she is determined not to grow cynical and that this attitude carries over to the creation of her own characters whose motivations she tries hard to understand
Published on Dec 10, 2021 04:06 PM IST
KX Ronnie
Review: The House Next To The Factory by Sonal Kohli
Set largely in Delhi between 1980 and 2010, Sonal Kohli’s short stories are loosely linked by a family that lives next to a factory, and follow the lives of its members, their domestic help, tuition teachers, cousins, and lovers
Updated on Dec 10, 2021 04:22 PM IST
Percy Bharucha
Review: Irrawaddy Imperatives by Jaideep Chanda
An attempt to address existing blind spots over Myanmar evident in policy, research and academic institutions across India
Updated on Dec 10, 2021 04:03 PM IST
Shrabana Barua
Review: India’s First Dictatorship; The Emergency, 1975-77 by Christophe Jaffrelot and Pratinav Anil
The first major academic work that sheds light on the similarities between the excesses of the incumbent Hindu Right regime and Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, this is the most comprehensive analysis of what led to the event, what happened during that dark time, and how it looks compared to the period leading to the present
Updated on Dec 09, 2021 06:33 PM IST
Shaikh Mujibur Rehman
‘Shouldn’t have been on bench that heard harassment charge’: Gogoi
A controversy had erupted after justice Gogoi presided over a three-judge bench on April 20, 2019 after the accusations of sexual harassment surfaced against him.
Published on Dec 09, 2021 01:37 AM IST
Utkarsh Anand, Hindustan Times, New Delhi
HT Picks; New Reads
On the reading list this week is a book that looks at what data tells us about the lives, beliefs and attitudes of contemporary Indians, another that presents how water-related extremes will shape our future, and a volume that celebrates India’s tradition of handcrafted textiles
Updated on Dec 03, 2021 05:44 PM IST
HT Team
Interview: M Mukundan, author, Delhi, A Soliloquy – “I always dream in Malayalam”
Winner of this year’s JCB Prize for Literature, M Mukundan talks about wandering the streets of Delhi, the power of translation, and contemporary Malayalam literature
Published on Dec 03, 2021 05:42 PM IST
Kunal Ray
Review: Nagme, Kisse, Baatein, Yaadein – The life and lyrics of Anand Bakshi by Rakesh Anand Bakshi
An accomplished biography, grounded in the reality that film songs deliver an emotional and textural surplus that stays much longer than their cinematic experience
Published on Dec 03, 2021 05:34 PM IST
Sudhirendar Sharma
Review: Christianity and Politics in Tribal India; Baptist Missionaries and Naga Nationalism by G Kanato Chophy
G Kanato Chophy disputes the conventional understanding that missionaries who came to India’s northeast highlands worked in tandem with the colonial powers to convert gullible tribal people with an exotic belief-system and the white man’s halo. The truth was far more complicated with the relationship between the American Baptist missionaries and the British administrators being more confrontational than cordial
Published on Dec 03, 2021 05:32 PM IST
Thangkhanlal Ngaihte
Review: Bombay Hangovers by Rochelle Potkar
Poet Rochelle Potkar’s first collection of short fiction includes 15 stories set in Mumbai and one set in Goa. They uncover the inner lives of characters while revealing the author’s knack for fashioning intricate plots and dissecting complex relationships
Updated on Dec 02, 2021 03:23 PM IST
Lamat R Hasan
Dinyar Patel wins Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize for 2021
The prestigious prize worth ₹15 lakh was awarded for Dinyar Patel’s biography of Dadabhai Naoroji, ‘Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism’, the first comprehensive study of the most significant Indian nationalist leader before Gandhi
Updated on Dec 01, 2021 02:07 PM IST
HT Team
HT Picks; New Reads
This week’s list of interesting reads includes a book that looks at the names of many streets and localities in Delhi while attempting to decode what the act of naming and renaming means, a volume on how India helped Bangladesh freedom fighters liberate their country, and an anthology of short stories by women writers from India and across the world
Updated on Nov 26, 2021 04:23 PM IST
HT Team
Heading: Interview, Shrayana Bhattacharya, author, Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh – “I’m a loud and proud feminist economist”
Economist Shrayana Bhattacharya believes that in a deeply unequal country, filmy fandom bridges class divisions and narrow identities. Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan, especially, allows people from vastly different backgrounds to talk to each other as equals. Her book uses Shah Rukh fandom to explore the struggles of Indian women as they work, worship and wed
Updated on Nov 27, 2021 01:11 PM IST
KX Ronnie
Excerpt: The Disruptor; How Vishwanath Pratap Singh Shook India by Debashish Mukerji
VP Singh’s prime-ministership was short but eventful and changed the trajectory of the nation. This first exclusive excerpt from a new book on him shows how the Mandal report’s recommendations on quotas for OBCs was finally implemented in 1993 despite widespread protests
Updated on Nov 26, 2021 09:00 PM IST
Debashish Mukerji
Interview: Damon Galgut, author of The Promise, winner of the Booker Prize for 2021
Damon Galgut, winner of the Booker Prize for 2021,talks about African fiction, the pervasive “cultural cringe” in ex-colonies, which considers only the works lauded in the Western countries to be valid, and racial fault lines in post-Apartheid South Africa
Updated on Nov 27, 2021 12:17 PM IST
Nawaid Anjum
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