Publishing house Juggernaut launched its smartphone app yesterday with 100+ titles, most interestingly a collection of erotic short fiction by Sunny Leone. The stories on Sweet Dreams will be published at 10pm every night, starting with ‘Seat 7E’, about a sexual encounter on an airplane. CliffsNotes: Leone uses to the familiar boy-meets-girl set-up in in this… Continue reading Book of the week: Sweet Dreams by Sunny Leone
Family Planning (2008), Karan Mahajan’s debut novel, begins with an explanation for its protagonist’s sizable progeny. The Delhi minister and father-of-13 finds the pregnant body irresistible, for reasons that include the unborn fetus “pleading for another sibling — begging, sobbing, moaning through the parched throat of his wife.” The Delhi native developed the sharp, merciless… Continue reading Name to know: Karan Mahajan
CliffsNotes: In 1996 Delhi, a small bomb goes off in the city’s bustling Lajpat Nagar market and has a lasting impact on two neighbouring families. The Khuranas lose both children in the blast; the Ahmeds’ son Mansoor suffers injuries but survives. As an adult, carrying the physical and psychological burden of the blast, Mansoor is… Continue reading Book of the week: The Association Of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan
At the first meeting of the ELLE Book Club, debut author Rosalyn D’Mello discussed her new erotic memoir A Handbook For My Lover (HarperCollins india) at Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai. As countless glasses of wine by Grover Zampa Vineyards and delicious starters and desserts by Indigo made their way around an intimate gathering, she spoke of love, sex, religion and writing with… Continue reading ELLE Book Club: In conversation with Rosalyn D’Mello
CliffsNotes: With sly humour, magical characters and crisp writing, Helen Oyeyemi ties together nine short stories with a common theme of a lock and key. Characters from certain short stories show up in others to give the book a sense of continuity and let you follow their journey across time zones and geographical locations; but it… Continue reading Book of the week: What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi
CliffsNotes: Through laconic personal narratives, Anjali Joseph shapes the disconnected lives of the novel’s two protagonists – Claire, a 35-year-old single mother employed at a near-extinct shoe factory in Norwich and Arun, a sixty-something chappal-maker from Kohlapur. Only connected by their trade, Claire and Arun navigate the mundane and the tragic, with little bursts of… Continue reading Book of the week: The Living by Anjali Joseph
It feels like cutting off my twenties, putting them in a box and sending them off to sea,” says Molly Crabapple, 32, about her memoir Drawing Blood (HarperCollins). “To write about your past is to make yourself separate from it. I feel adrift after that.” The personal has always tangled with the political in Crabapple’s… Continue reading Name to know: Molly Crabapple
CliffsNotes: The memoir offers an intimate look at multi-hyphenate Padma Lakshmi’s life – from her immigrant childhood in the United States to her stormy marriage to author Salman Rushdie, and her long-drawn battle with endometriosis. The Top Chef host narrates her story with a startling honesty, and routinely layers personal experience with good food advice.… Continue reading Book of the week: Love, Loss, And What We Ate: A Memoir
The trouble with success lies in the afterword. Once you’ve crowd-surfed through dizzying fame and millions in earnings, landing back on your feet and taking the metro home is a bummer. But Yann Martel managed it differently. During his time with literary stardom, the Canadian author welcomed the success, and rejected the celebrity. Yes to… Continue reading Life Of Pi author Yann Martel on surviving fame and keeping the faith
CliffNotes: After Gone Girl and Girl On The Train, the domestic noir chain continues with The Widow. Jean Taylor plays the perfect wife to her husband Glen, who’s accused of kidnapping a two-year-old girl. But when Glen is killed in a freak sidewalk accident, does Jean let her guard slip? Told from the perspective of the widow,… Continue reading Book of the week: The Widow by Fiona Barton
There’s something desperate about reading a self-help book. Admitting that you need help with basic tasks that most other humans seem to manage, like daily exercise, getting a date or loving yourself, can seem kind of pathetic. But the lure of these books is urgent. They’re like those ads for creams that solve embarrassing body… Continue reading New age self-help books you need to read right now
Cliffnotes: Using brief, recollective episodes, Barnes constructs the fictional biography of Dmitri Shostakovich, a Soviet-era Russian composer and his steady manipulation by the ‘Power’. His opera Lady Macbeth Of The Mtsensk District is flagged unfit for consumption after Stalin walks out in disgust, and a review titled ‘Muddle Instead Of Music’ in the Communist publication Pravda costs him… Continue reading Book of the week: The Noise Of Time by Julian Barnes
Cliffsnotes: A Handbook for My Lover by Rosalyn D’Mello is an erotic non-fiction memoir that chronicles six years of her love affair with a much older man that seems fated to end. Told in the form of long, lyrical letters to her lover (who does not read) – the author lays bare her desires, insecurities, sexual… Continue reading Book of the week: A Handbook For My Lover by Rosalyn D’Mello
The ELLE Book Club, supported by Bloomsbury India, celebrated literary legend Margaret Atwood at an intimate soirée during this year’s ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival. The setting was the lovely Samode Haveli, which was lit up and lined with candles and marigold flowers. Guests — including top publishers, writers, journalists and book hounds — raised their… Continue reading The ELLE Book Club celebrated lit legend Margaret Atwood
Cliffsnotes: In Other Words (or In Altre Parole) is a memoir about falling in love with a new language, written entirely in Italian (don’t fret, the English translation appears right alongside the Italian text). It describes Lahiri’s immersive learning of the language, her impostor syndrome from winning the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Interpreter Of Maladies,… Continue reading Book of the week: In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri
The High Mountains Of Portugal by Yann Martel Cliffsnotes: Three men deep in grief and separated by decades bridge the novel’s loosely connected stories. In ‘Homeless’, Tomas, a museum worker in 1904 Lisbon, sets out to find a crucifix that could challenge the foundations of Christianity; in ‘Homeward’ a pathologist is visited by a woman carrying her… Continue reading Book of the week: The High Mountains Of Portugal by Yann Martel
