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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Apprenticeship Of Duddy Kravitz'
Set during the 1990s in an overcrowded and politically corrupt Bombay, Rohinton Mistry's Family Matters depicts a family being torn apart by lies, love, and its unresolved demons of the past. Nariman Vakeel is an aging patriarch whose advancing Parkinson's disease and its related complications threaten to destroy his large Parsi family. When Nariman breaks his ankle and becomes bedridden, his two stepchildren turn his care over to their half-sister, Roxanne, who lives in a two-room flat with her husband and two sons. What follows is each character's reaction to this situation, from Roxanne's husband's struggle to provide for his family without neglecting his conscience to their sons' coming of age in an era of uncertainty. Expertly interspersed between these dilemmas are Nariman's tortured remembrances of a forbidden love and its inescapable consequences ("no matter where you go in the world, there is only one story: of youth, and loss, and yearning for redemption. So we tell the same story, over and over. Just the details are different").
Family Matters is a compelling, emotional, and persuasive testimony to the importance of memories in every family's history. In a poetic style rich with detail, Mistry creates a world where fate dances with free will, and the results are often more familiar than anyone would ever care to admit. --Gisele Toueg [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Bats Fly Up for Inspector Ghote'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Beach Boy'
"References to my mother's not feeding me enough, sometimes overt, sometimes snide, had a currency amongst the neighbors at whose houses I often ate. I considered these insults a fee one had to pay for eating their food, for demanding their friendship, for sleeping in their beds, partaking of their quarrels, sharing their holidays, walking their dogs, making love to them, even sharing in their dreams. Generosity is often spiked."
That's Cyrus Readymoney speaking. He's smart. He's silver-tongued. He's shameless. He's all of 8 years old, the narrator and main attraction of Beach Boy, Ardashir Vakil's widely praised first novel of growing up Parsi in Bombay, circa 1970.
Cyrus is the newest initiate in the club of boyish spellbinders whose members include Edwin Mullhouse, Holden Caulfield, and Paddy Clarke, those good bad boys whose uncensored conjurings remind us how titillating, entertaining, and essentially mysterious life can be before manners and received opinions settle upon it like a veneer of dust. The benign neglect of his wealthy family not only affords Cyrus endless opportunities to observe his neighbors and tag along on their adventures, but it gives Beach Boy a cast of characters as wonderfully diverse as middle-class India itself. The big, athletic Krishnan family; the Maharani and her seductive daughter; Minoo and Mehroo Readymoney, Cyrus's cosmopolitan and self-involved progenitors; the household servant Bhagwan; brusque Aunty Zenobia; Mrs. Verma of the hundred different smiles--Ardashir Vakil evokes them all with naughty gusto. Since Cyrus is already wildly precocious and agelessly astute, calling Beach Boy a coming-of-age story in the traditional sense seems wrong. As his parents' marital difficulties reach crisis proportions, what our young hero loses is not so much his innocence, or his illusions, as his child's license to roam freely, an opportunist of insight and experience. By the time Cyrus suffers his first grown-up losses, we feel them, too, because he has given us so much delight, because we understand how deeply resonant his impish spirit is. --Joyce Thompson [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Bombay Talkie'
Sabah, a young American woman of Indian heritage, sets out to discover her identity in India, only to stumble into a decadent, upper-class demi-monde. Ameena Meer presents a portrait of a generation of young Indians as confused by Westernization as they are tied to tradition and family. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Bombay Time'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Chasing the Monsoon'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Chasing the Monsoon: A Modern Pilgrimage Through India'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Collected Fictions'
Although Jorge Luis Borges published his first book in 1923--doling out his own money for a limited edition of Fervor de Buenos Aires--he remained in Argentinian obscurity for almost three decades. In 1951, however, Ficciones appeared in French, followed soon after by an English translation. This collection, which included the cream of the author's short fictions, made it clear that Borges was a world-class (if highly unclassifiable) artist--a brilliant, lyrical miniaturist, who could pose the great questions of existence on the head of pin. And by 1961, when he shared the French Prix Formentor with Samuel Beckett, he seemed suddenly to tower over a half-dozen literary cultures, the very exemplar of modernism with a human face.
By the time of his death in 1986, Borges had been granted old master status by almost everybody (except, alas, the gentlemen of the Swedish Academy). Yet his work remained dispersed among a half-dozen different collections, some of them increasingly hard to find. Andrew Hurley has done readers a great service, then, by collecting all the stories in a single, meticulously translated volume. It's a pleasure to be reminded that Borges's style--poetic, dreamlike, and compounded of innumerable small surprises--was already in place by 1935, when he published A Universal History of Iniquity: "The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it." (Incidentally, the thrifty author later recycled the second of these aphorisms in his classic bit of bookish metaphysics, "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Teris.") The glories of his middle period, of course, have hardly aged a day. "The Garden of the Forking Paths" remains the best deconstruction of the detective story ever written, even in the post-Auster era, and "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" puts the so-called death of the author in pointed, hilarious perspective.
But Hurley's omnibus also brings home exactly how consistent Borges remained in his concerns. As late as 1975, in "Avelino Arredondo," he was still asking (and occasionally even answering) the same riddles about time and its human repository, memory: "For the man in prison, or the blind man, time flows downstream as though down a slight decline. As he reached the midpoint of his reclusion, Arredondo more than once achieved that virtually timeless time. In the first patio there was a wellhead, and at the bottom, a cistern where a toad lived; it never occurred to Arredondo that it was the toad's time, bordering on eternity, that he sought." Throughout, Hurley's translation is crisp and assured (although this reader will always have a soft spot for "Funes, the Memorious" rather than "Funes, His Memory.") And thanks to his efforts, Borgesians will find no better--and no more pleasurable--rebuttal of the author's description of himself as "a shy sort of man who could not bring himself to write short stories." --James Marcus [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Collected Fictions'
Although Jorge Luis Borges published his first book in 1923--doling out his own money for a limited edition of Fervor de Buenos Aires--he remained in Argentinian obscurity for almost three decades. In 1951, however, Ficciones appeared in French, followed soon after by an English translation. This collection, which included the cream of the author's short fictions, made it clear that Borges was a world-class (if highly unclassifiable) artist--a brilliant, lyrical miniaturist, who could pose the great questions of existence on the head of pin. And by 1961, when he shared the French Prix Formentor with Samuel Beckett, he seemed suddenly to tower over a half-dozen literary cultures, the very exemplar of modernism with a human face.
By the time of his death in 1986, Borges had been granted old master status by almost everybody (except, alas, the gentlemen of the Swedish Academy). Yet his work remained dispersed among a half-dozen different collections, some of them increasingly hard to find. Andrew Hurley has done readers a great service, then, by collecting all the stories in a single, meticulously translated volume. It's a pleasure to be reminded that Borges's style--poetic, dreamlike, and compounded of innumerable small surprises--was already in place by 1935, when he published A Universal History of Iniquity: "The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it." (Incidentally, the thrifty author later recycled the second of these aphorisms in his classic bit of bookish metaphysics, "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Teris.") The glories of his middle period, of course, have hardly aged a day. "The Garden of the Forking Paths" remains the best deconstruction of the detective story ever written, even in the post-Auster era, and "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" puts the so-called death of the author in pointed, hilarious perspective.
But Hurley's omnibus also brings home exactly how consistent Borges remained in his concerns. As late as 1975, in "Avelino Arredondo," he was still asking (and occasionally even answering) the same riddles about time and its human repository, memory: "For the man in prison, or the blind man, time flows downstream as though down a slight decline. As he reached the midpoint of his reclusion, Arredondo more than once achieved that virtually timeless time. In the first patio there was a wellhead, and at the bottom, a cistern where a toad lived; it never occurred to Arredondo that it was the toad's time, bordering on eternity, that he sought." Throughout, Hurley's translation is crisp and assured (although this reader will always have a soft spot for "Funes, the Memorious" rather than "Funes, His Memory.") And thanks to his efforts, Borgesians will find no better--and no more pleasurable--rebuttal of the author's description of himself as "a shy sort of man who could not bring himself to write short stories." --James Marcus [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Death of Mr. Love: A Novel'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Death of Vishnu'
The title of Manil Suri's first novel gets right to the point. His protagonist, having purchased the right to sleep on the ground-floor landing of a Bombay apartment house, slips slowly from a coma into death. As this aging alcoholic takes leave of the earth, his neighbors surround him, arguing over who gave Vishnu a few dried chapatis, who called the doctor for him, and who will pay for the ambulance to cart him away. Meanwhile, the hero of The Death of Vishnu is lost in memories. Drifting through increasingly vivid scenes from his past, he recalls his relatively rare snatches of love and joy--and especially his romance with Padmini, a self-involved prostitute. On one particular day, it seems, he stole one of his employer's cars and drove his love interest to the honeymoon town of Lonavala, where he showered her with gifts and finally lifted her veil to kiss her like a bride:
Then the absurdity of the situation strikes him. The preposterousness of his images, the foolishness of his feelings, the comicality of chasing currents that skim across Padmini's face. He thinks how absurd this whole trip has been, how absurd is the presence of the two of them in Lonavala, how absurd is the scenery itself that stretches before them. He thinks of poor, ridiculous Mr. Jalal, waiting back in Bombay for his Fiat, and of how Padmini will react when he asks her to buy them petrol so they can get back.Vishnu also recalls his secret passion for Kavita Asrani, the beautiful teenage daughter of one of the families for whom he works. Given the protagonist's focus on his hapless love life, the scope of Suri's dazzling debut may appear narrow. However, the apartment house upon whose floor Vishnu spends his final hours functions as a microcosm of Indian society. It helps to know even a smattering about Hindu mythology or India's religious conflicts. But even if you don't, there is plenty to relish in The Death of Vishnu, with its comical, richly drawn characters, loving attention to the details of everyday life, and provocative exploration of destiny and free will. --Regina Marler [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Diamond: The History of a Cold-Blooded Love Affair'
"Diamonds are forever," goes the familiar refrain, and we take the truth of that statement for granted just as we take for granted the inherent value of the much sought-after object. That phrase, though, was actually coined in the 1950s by a copywriter named Frances Gerety working on an ad campaign for the biggest diamond company in the world. That's just one nugget of information contained in Diamond, Matthew Hart's exploration of diamonds and the industry that has grown up around them. The Toronto-based journalist journeys from the wilds of South American to the barren Arctic landscape of Canada, the jungles of South Africa, and the back streets of India. Stops along the way include geologists' digs, a jeweller's cutting room, dealers' backrooms, and the boardrooms of industry titan De Beers. Some of Diamond, like a chapter in which a group of small-scale miners unearth "a large pink" on the Rio Abaete in Brazil, reads like first-rate airport fiction. Or a passage in which a diamond-cutter goes to work on a 599-carat "top-white" discovered in South Africa: "Gabi Tolkowsky studied the Centenary diamond for a year, discovering the magnitude of the challenge. As he scrutinized the larger cracks with a microscope, he saw, at the deepest point of penetration, networks of much tinier cracks and... a bubble. It was these infinitesimal bubbles that frightened Tolkowsky most." By the time the cutter has finished his examination, made models, and decided on the shape the diamond should be, three years have gone by.
Not all of Diamond glitters--those whose eyes glaze over in the presence of too many numbers and dollar signs may find the backroom shenanigans a challenge, and one dig in particular in the Canadian wilderness seems to go on, well, forever. But the nuts and bolts of locating the mines, the actual cutting and shaping, the ultimate fate of the larger ones, methods of theft, and the creation of a demand for an essentially useless item ("Within three years of Gerety's late-night inspiration, 80 percent of American marriages were starting with a diamond ring") make Diamond a fascinating read for anyone with more than a passing curiosity about these bits of carbon that have become synonymous with both love and money. --Shawn Conner [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Die Satanischen Verse'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies'
John Murray trained as a doctor, and his debut collection of stories, A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies, reveals its author's background. Not all of his characters are physicians, but they tend to share a doctor's ability to concentrate on details and compartmentalize emotions. In "The Hill Station," the American-born daughter of Indian parents returns to India, where she speaks at a conference on infectious diseases. She is charged with new, ungovernable feelings when she finally meets actual patients with the disease she specializes in; heretofore, she had only known cholera under a microscope. Murray bumps his heroine into a new, looser way of living as she travels deeper into dirty, disease-ridden India. In the title story, a doctor mourns the loss of his sister and comes to terms with his family history, all the while examining butterflies. In "Blue," a climber ascends a Himalayan peak under dire circumstances and encounters ghostly memories of his father. These stories of frustrated, intelligent achievers can recall Mark Helprin, and Murray has, too, some of Helprin's ambitious scope. These stories aren't as crystalline as Helprin's, but that's a small complaint to lodge about an elegant first collection. --Claire Dederer [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fine Balance'
A fiction work by Rohinto Mistry and published by McClelland & Stewart Ltd in Canada in 1995. In paperback format, it has 822 pages. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fire!: The 100 Most Devastating Fires Through the Ages and the Heroes Who Fought Them'
The harrowing stories and vivid images of the most devastating fires throughout history come alive in this groundbreaking volume, rich with history, science and breathtaking real-life adventure.
The 100 most infamous fires through the ages leap full-blown from the pages of FIRE!, complete with the ravages caused by the consuming infernos and the courage of the men and women who fought the conflagrations. Lively artwork and photographs on show blazing buildings, tragedy-stricken survivors, charred destruction, and firefighters in the heat of the battle. Fascinating history, along with technical information about the nature, causes and behavior of fires, take readers into the dangerous and complex world of firefighting, to examine the first fire engines and brigades; to understand how and why fires are sometimes set to put out fires; when airdrops are used; how to avoid dangerous backdrafts; and much, much more. The book features fires from the beginning of recorded history and includes the 1666 Great London Fire, the 1858 New York Crystal Palace Fire, the 1902 Atlantic City Fire, the
1906 San Francisco Fire, the World War II Dresden Firestorm, the 1980 MGM Grand Hotel and Casino Fire, the 1991 Oakland/Berkeley Hills Fire and the Los Alamos Wildfires of 2000. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Furia / Fury'
Malik Solanka, original de Bombay, filósofo educado en Cambridge e inventor de una popular muñeca, abandona un día a su familia en Londres, sin dar ninguna explicación, y se escapa a Nueva York. Lleva la furia dentro y teme haberse convertido en un peligro para los que quiere. Llega a Nueva York en un momento de abundancia sin precedentes, el colmo de la riqueza y del poder americano. Pero la furia está a su alrededor... Un asesino en serie mata a mujeres con un trozo de cemento. Una mujer joven con un gorro de béisbol le acecha. Y otra mujer, de quien se enamorará, le atraerá con una furia diferente, una furia con raíces en un país lejano. Mientras tanto pierde el control de sus propios pensamientos, emociones y deseos. Un gran amor que se ha echado a perder, una pasión que se apoya en cimientos falsos y un tercer amor que, con un poco de suerte, a lo mejor sale bien. Furia es una obra de energía explosiva, despiadada, y a la vez una comedia negra, una investigación profundamente inquietante del lado más oscuro de la naturaleza humana y de la sociedad opulenta. Pocas veces se ha logrado captar la esencia de un lugar y de un tiempo tan intensa y exactamente en una novela. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fury'
life is fury. Fury-sexual, oedipal, political, magical, brutal- drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. This is what we are, what we civilize ourselves to disguise-the terrifying human animal in us, the exalted, transcendent, self-destructive, untrammeled lord of creation. We raise each other to the heights of joy. We tear each other limb from bloody limb." malik solanka, historian of ideas and dollmaker extraordinaire, steps out of his life one day, abandons his family without a word of explanation, and flees london for new york. There's a fury within him, and he fears he has become dangerous to those he loves. He arrives in new york at a time of unprecedented plenty, in the highest hour of america's wealth and power, seeking to "erase" himself. Eat me, america, he prays, and give me peace.but fury is all around him. Cabdrivers spout invective. A serial killer is murdering women with a lump of concrete. The petty spats and bone-deep resentments of the metropolis engulf him. His own thoughts, emotions, and desires, meanwhile, are also running wild. A tall, green-eyed young blonde in a d'angelo voodoo baseball cap is in store for him. As is another woman, with whom he will fall in love and be drawn toward a different fury, whose roots lie on the far side of the world. Fury is a work of explosive energy, at once a pitiless and pitch-black comedy, a profoundly disturbing inquiry into the darkest side of human nature, and a love story of mesmerizing force. It is also an astonishing portrait of new york. Not since the bombay of midnight's children have a time and place been so intensely and accurately captured in a novel. In his eighth novel, salman rushdie brilliantly entwines moments of anger and frenzy with those of humor, honesty, and intimacy. Fury is, above all, a masterly chronicle of the human condition [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Ground Beneath Her Feet'
Salman Rushdie's most ambitious and accomplished novel, sure to be hailed as his masterpiece. At the beginning of this stunning novel, Vina Apsara, a famous and much-loved singer, is caught up in a devastating earthquake and never seen again by human eyes. This is her story, and that of Ormus Cama, the lover who finds, loses, seeks, and again finds her, over and over, throughout his own extraordinary life in music. Their epic romance is narrated by Ormus's childhood friend and Vina's sometime lover, her "back-door man," the photographer Rai, whose astonishing voice, filled with stories, images, myths, anger, wisdom, humor, and love, is perhaps the book's true hero. Telling the story of Ormus and Vina, he finds that he is also revealing his own truths: his human failings, his immortal longings. He is a man caught up in the loves and quarrels of the age's goddesses and gods, but dares to have ambitions of his own. And lives to tell the tale. Around these three, the uncertain world itself is beginning to tremble and break. Cracks and tears have begun to appear in the fabric of the real. There are glimpses of abysses below the surfaces of things. The Ground Beneath Her Feet is Salman Rushdie's most gripping novel and his boldest imaginative act, a vision of our shaken, mutating times, an engagement with the whole of what is and what might be, an account of the intimate, flawed encounter between the East and the West, a brilliant remaking of the myth of Orpheus, a novel of high (and low) comedy, high (and low) passions, high (and low) culture. It is a tale of love, death, and rock 'n' roll. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Impressionist'
The antihero of The Impressionist, Hari Kunzru's daringly ambitious first novel, is half English and half Indian. In the Raj of the 1920s, the racial and social divides are enormous, but Pran Nath is able to bridge them, crossing from one side to another in a series of reinventions of his own personality. He begins as the spoiled child of an Indian lawyer, but circumstances thrust him out of his pampered adolescence into the teeming and dangerous life of the streets. After a bewildering period as one of the pawns in Machiavellian political and sexual scheming in the decadent court of a minor Maharajah, he escapes to Bombay. There he is taken up by a half-demented Scottish missionary and his wife, but Pran Nath prefers to slope off to the city's red-light district whenever he can. During a time of riot and bloodshed, the chance of re-creating himself as an English schoolboy destined for public school and Oxford presents itself, and he takes it. But this is not his final transformation.
In certain ways Kunzru is almost too ambitious. There is so much crammed onto the pages of The Impressionist that some of it, almost inevitably, doesn't work as well as it might. However, as the shapeshifting Pran Nath moves from one identity to another, knockabout farce mixes with satire, social comedy with parody. And beneath the comic exuberance and linguistic invention, there is an intelligent and occasionally moving examination of notions of self, identity, and what it means to belong to a class or society. --Nick Rennison, Amazon.co.uk [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Inspector Ghote Breaks an Egg'
In a small, provincial town in the heart of India, a politician's wife has done her husband's career a great service, by dying under suspicious circumstances. That the corpse and the trail have been cold for fifteen years hasn't saved Inspector Ghote of the Bombay CID from being sent to investigate. But what chance does he have when his chief suspect is so powerful, when the whole district is against him, and when a holy man is fasting to the death to protest his prying? But still the good inspector dutifully goes, carrying just the honour of his police force and a box of double-sized eggs... [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Inspector Ghote Trusts the Heart'
Inspector Ghost of the Bombay CID is faced with a kidnapping case with a fearful difference. He is sent to keep contact with the kidnappers at the home of Manibhai Desai, the rich manufacturer of the tonic, Trust-X. But it is not the Desai boy's life that is set against a huge ransom: it is that of the son of the tailor who works for the family. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Inspector Ghote Trusts the Heart'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey'
In this timeless, haunting portrait of the people and the politics of Nicaragua, Rushdie brings to life the palpable human facts of a country in the midst of a revolution. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Last Song of Dusk'
Set in colonial India, "The Last Song Of Dusk" follows the fortunes of Anuradha, whose fabled beauty is such that the peacocks of Udaipur gather to bid her farewell as she journeys to meet her groom, Vardhmaan, in Bombay. Anuradha's bittersweet story intertwines with that of her cousin Nandini - a seductive orphan with a dark heart, a penchant for panthers and an extraordinary gift for painting - and with the secret history and slow-burning revenge of a house. Written in Technicolour, Bollywood prose, this is a magical piece of storytelling, a novel that pirouettes between laughter and heartbreak, which will appeal to all fans of Joanne Harris, Isabel Allende and Arundhati Roy. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Love and Longing in Bombay'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Maximum City: Bombay Lost And Found'
A native of Bombay, Suketu Mehta gives us an insiders view of this stunning metropolis. He approaches the city from unexpected angles, taking us into the criminal underworld of rival Muslim and Hindu gangs; following the life of a bar dancer raised amid poverty and abuse; opening the door into the inner sanctums of Bollywood; and delving into the stories of the countless villagers who come in search of a better life and end up living on the sidewalks. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Midnight's Children'
Anyone who has spent time in the developing world will know that one of Bombay's claims to fame is the enormous film industry that churns out hundreds of musical fantasies each year. The other, of course, is native son Salman Rushdie--less prolific, perhaps than Bollywood, but in his own way just as fantastical. Though Rushdie's novels lack the requisite six musical numbers that punctuate every Bombay talkie, they often share basic plot points with their cinematic counterparts. Take, for example, his 1980 Booker Prize-winning Midnight's Children: two children born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947--the moment at which India became an independent nation--are switched in the hospital. The infant scion of a wealthy Muslim family is sent to be raised in a Hindu tenement, while the legitimate heir to such squalor ends up establishing squatters' rights to his unlucky hospital mate's luxurious bassinet. Switched babies are standard fare for a Hindi film, and one can't help but feel that Rushdie's world-view--and certainly his sense of the fantastical--has been shaped by the films of his childhood. But whereas the movies, while entertaining, are markedly mediocre, Midnight's Children is a masterpiece, brilliant written, wildly unpredictable, hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measure.
Rushdie's narrator, Saleem Sinai, is the Hindu child raised by wealthy Muslims. Near the beginning of the novel, he informs us that he is falling apart--literally:
I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over like an old jug--that my poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history, subjected to drainage above and drainage below, mutilated by doors, brained by spittoons, has started coming apart at the seams. In short, I am literally disintegrating, slowly for the moment, although there are signs of an acceleration.In light of this unfortunate physical degeneration, Saleem has decided to write his life story, and, incidentally, that of India's, before he crumbles into "(approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious, dust." It seems that within one hour of midnight on India's independence day, 1,001 children were born. All of those children were endowed with special powers: some can travel through time, for example; one can change gender. Saleem's gift is telepathy, and it is via this power that he discovers the truth of his birth: that he is, in fact, the product of the illicit coupling of an Indian mother and an English father, and has usurped another's place. His gift also reveals the identities of all the other children and the fact that it is in his power to gather them for a "midnight parliament" to save the nation. To do so, however, would lay him open to that other child, christened Shiva, who has grown up to be a brutish killer. Saleem's dilemma plays out against the backdrop of the first years of independence: the partition of India and Pakistan, the ascendancy of "The Widow" Indira Gandhi, war, and, eventually, the imposition of martial law.
We've seen this mix of magical thinking and political reality before in the works of Günter Grass and Gabriel García Márquez. What sets Rushdie apart is his mad prose pyrotechnics, the exuberant acrobatics of rhyme and alliteration, pun, wordplay, proper and "Babu" English chasing each other across the page in a dizzying, exhilarating cataract of words. Rushdie can be laugh-out-loud funny, but make no mistake--this is an angry book, and its author's outrage lends his language wings. Midnight's Children is Salman Rushdie's irate, affectionate love song to his native land--not so different from a Bombay talkie, after all. --Alix Wilber [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Moor's Last Sigh'
In The Moor's Last Sigh Salman Rushdie revisits some of the same ground he covered in his greatest novel, Midnight's Children. This book is narrated by Moraes Zogoiby, aka Moor, who speaks to us from a gravestone in Spain. Like Moor, Rushdie knows about a life spent in banishment from normal society--Rushdie because of the death sentence that followed The Satanic Verses, Moor because he ages at twice the rate of normal humans. Yet Moor's story of travail is bigger than Rushdie's; it encompasses a grand struggle between good and evil while Moor himself stands as allegory for Rushdie's home country of India. Filled with wordplay and ripe with humor, it is an epic work, and Rushdie has the tools to pull it off. He earned a 1995 Whitbread Prize for his efforts. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Murder On The Salsette'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sacred Games'
Fiction Chandra, Vikram India [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Satanic Verses : A Novel'
No book in modern times has matched the uproar sparked by Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, which earned its author a death sentence. Furor aside, it is a marvelously erudite study of good and evil, a feast of language served up by a writer at the height of his powers, and a rollicking comic fable. The book begins with two Indians, Gibreel Farishta ("for fifteen years the biggest star in the history of the Indian movies") and Saladin Chamcha, a Bombay expatriate returning from his first visit to his homeland in 15 years, plummeting from the sky after the explosion of their jetliner, and proceeds through a series of metamorphoses, dreams and revelations. Rushdie's powers of invention are astonishing in this Whitbread Prize winner. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Selected Non-Fictions'
Jorge Luis Borges was our century's greatest miniaturist, perpetually cramming entire universes onto the head of a pin. Yet his splendid economy, along the wafer-thin proportions of such classic volumes as Ficciones and Labyrinths, has given readers the impression that Borges was miserly with his prose. In fact, he was something of a verbal spendthrift. His collected stories alone run to nearly 1,000 pages. And his nonfiction output was even more staggering: the young Borges cranked out hundreds of essays, book notes, cultural polemics, and movie reviews, and even after he lost his sight in 1955, he continued to dictate short pieces by the dozens. Eliot Weinberger has assembled just a fraction of this outpouring in Selected Non-Fictions, and the result is a 559-page Borgesian blowout, in which the Argentinean fabulist takes on being and nothingness, James Joyce and Lana Turner, and (surprisingly) racial hatred and the rise of Nazism. So much for our image of the mandarin bookworm! The very engagé author of this book seems more like a subequatorial Camus, with a dash of Siskel and Ebert on the side.
Selected Non-Fictions demonstrates just how quickly Borges began wrestling with such brainteasers as identity, time, and infinity. Indeed, the very first piece in the collection, "The Nothingness of Personality" (1922), already finds him fiddling with the self: "I, as I write this, am only a certainty that seeks out the words that are most apt to compel your attention. That proposition and a few muscular sensations, and the sight of the limpid branches that the trees place outside my window, constitute my current I." There are many such meditations here, including "A History of Eternity" (in which Borges maps out his own, disarmingly empty version of the eternal, "without a God or even a co-proprietor, and entirely devoid of archetypes"). But it's more fun--and more revelatory--to see the author venturing beyond his metaphysical stomping grounds. Borges on King Kong is a hoot, and a cornball masterpiece such as The Petrified Forest elicits this terrific nugget: "Death works in this film like hypnosis or alcohol: it brings the recesses of the soul into the light of day." His capsule biographies are a delight, his critiques of Nazi propaganda are memorably stringent, and nobody should miss him on the tango. True, the sheer variety and mind-boggling erudition of Selected Non-Fictions can be a little forbidding. But, taken as a whole, the collection surely meets the specifications that Borges laid out in a 1927 essay on literary pleasure: "If only some eternal book existed, primed for our enjoyment and whims, no less inventive in the populous morning as in the secluded night, oriented toward all hours of the world." Oh, but it does. --James Marcus [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Selective Memory: Stories from My Life'
Autobiographical account of leading Indian novelist, life and times. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Shantaram'
Crime and punishment, passion and loyalty, betrayal and redemption are only a few of the ingredients in Shantaram, a massive, over-the-top, mostly autobiographical novel. Shantaram is the name given Mr. Lindsay, or Linbaba, the larger-than-life hero. It means "man of God's peace," which is what the Indian people know of Lin. What they do not know is that prior to his arrival in Bombay he escaped from an Australian prison where he had begun serving a 19-year sentence. He served two years and leaped over the wall. He was imprisoned for a string of armed robberies peformed to support his heroin addiction, which started when his marriage fell apart and he lost custody of his daughter. All of that is enough for several lifetimes, but for Greg Roberts, that's only the beginning.
He arrives in Bombay with little money, an assumed name, false papers, an untellable past, and no plans for the future. Fortunately, he meets Prabaker right away, a sweet, smiling man who is a street guide. He takes to Lin immediately, eventually introducing him to his home village, where they end up living for six months. When they return to Bombay, they take up residence in a sprawling illegal slum of 25,000 people and Linbaba becomes the resident "doctor." With a prison knowledge of first aid and whatever medicines he can cadge from doing trades with the local Mafia, he sets up a practice and is regarded as heaven-sent by these poor people who have nothing but illness, rat bites, dysentery, and anemia. He also meets Karla, an enigmatic Swiss-American woman, with whom he falls in love. Theirs is a complicated relationship, and Karlas connections are murky from the outset.
Roberts is not reluctant to wax poetic; in fact, some of his prose is downright embarrassing. Throughought the novel, however, all 944 pages of it, every single sentence rings true. He is a tough guy with a tender heart, one capable of what is judged criminal behavior, but a basically decent, intelligent man who would never intentionally hurt anyone, especially anyone he knew. He is a magnet for trouble, a soldier of fortune, a picaresque hero: the rascal who lives by his wits in a corrupt society. His story is irresistible. Stay tuned for the prequel and the sequel. --Valerie Ryan [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Such a Long Journey'
It is Bombay in 1971, the year India went to war over what was to become Bangladesh. A hard-working bank clerk, Gustad Noble is a devoted family man who gradually sees his modest life unravelling. His young daughter falls ill; his promising son defies his fathers ambitions for him. He is the one reasonable voice amidst the ongoing dramas of his neighbours. One day, he receives a letter from an old friend, asking him to help in what at first seems like an heroic mission. But he soon finds himself unwittingly drawn into a dangerous network of deception. Compassionate, and rich in details of character and place, this unforgettable novel charts the journey of a moral heart in a turbulent world of change. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Sultry Days'
On a sultry, rainy Bombay day Nisha, an impressionable teenager, meets God in the college canteen and falls in love with his ragged, bearded looks and crude, streetwise manners. God patronizingly accepts her into his 'group' and it is in this way that their long and passionate romance begins...God's driving ambition leads him into the unreal world of pseudo poetry, art for hire and compromised journalism while Nisha lands a job in advertising. Sycophants, court jesters, whores, dirty old men, fixers, pretty boys and party girls drift in and out of their lives (and interrupt their romance!) as their careers take off with dizzying speed...And then, abruptly and harrowingly, everything about their lives goes wrong...'Ms De shocks India, and much of its literary set like no other writer today' --New York Times [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Swimming Lessons'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Swimming Lessons, and Other Stories from Firozsha Baag'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Tales from Firozsha Baag'
Tales from Firozsha Baag is Rohinton Mistry's best, but least-known, book. Other strengths aside, Mistry is plodding as a novelist. Here, in this collection of interrelated short stories, Mistry is at his most natural, showing us the actions and thoughts of characters while never condescending to tell us their theme or import. Each of the 11 linked stories is set in a different apartment in the shared Firozsha Baag (Fur-oh-shaw Bog) complex, where more than cooking odours and telltale noises travel from apartment to apartment. Joggers visible out a window in "The Collectors" later become inspiration, liberation and, arguably, temptation for young Jehangir in the aching "Exercisers."
In Mistry's dexterous hands, the apartment complex is not just a clever device for uniting stories that made their debuts independently in Canada's best literary magazines. Firozsha Baag is a gossamer antenna tuned to the barely detectable human stories haunting our peculiar spaces: "No ayah [nanny/maid]," Mistry knows, "gets key to a flat. It is something I have learned, like I learned forty-nine years ago that life as ayah means living close to floor. All work I do, I do on floors.... Food also is eaten sitting on floor, after serving them at dining-table." A uniquely accomplished first book. --Darryl Whetter [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Trying to Grow'
Brit Kotwal, so called because he suffers from a brittle bone condition, lives near Bombay in India. He feels that sometimes it is fun being different, drinking powdered pearls in his milk or having almond oil rubbed into his legs. He thinks he knows the answer to how he can grow. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Furia / Fury'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Un Viaje Muy Largo/ A Very Long Trip'
PERFECT CONDITION [via]
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