Search results for ""Author Sunandini Banerjee""

One of the shortest collections of texts, consisting of seventeen or eighteen verses, the Isha Upanishad is significant because of its explanation of man's relationship with nature and God. This edition of the Isha Upanishad has been translated in clear and vivid language by a renowned poet, painter, and filmmaker.

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May 1992. In Russia, Boris Yeltsin is showing millions of communists the spectre of capitalism. Yugoslavia is disintegrating. United Germany is uncertain about their next move, and communism is collapsing all around. And in a corner of old Calcutta, Herbert Sarkar, sole proprietor of a company that delivers messages from the dead, decides to give up the ghost. Decides to give up his aunt and uncle, his friends and foes, his fondness for kites, his aching heart that broke for Buki, his top terrace from where he stared up at the sky, his Ulster overcoat with buttons like big black medals, his notebook full of poems, his Park Street every evening when the sun goes down, his memory of a Russian girl running across the great black earth as the soldiers lift their guns and get ready to fire, his fairy who beat her wings against his window and filled his room with blue light . . .Now in a new translation, Herbert, the beloved cult favourite by Nabarun Bhattacharya, and winner of the 1997 Sahitya Akademi Award, is a ‘scathingly satiric, wildly energetic, and yet depply tender’ portrayal of a doomed young man and a city struggling to resist forces that, alas, prove to be entirely beyond their control.Praise for Herbert‘This first U.S. publication brings off a remarkable resurrection, one that erupts full-blooded, alive with laughter, stink and rage.’— John Domini, Washington Post‘Swift and strange, [Herbert] tells the story of its titular character, an orphan whose life is characterized by loss and longing: a sweeping view of the richness and the turmoil of Bengali culture, literature, and politics in the twentieth century.’— New Yorker‘[Sunandini] Banerjee’s acrobatic translation is both enormously fun and true to the radical content. The writing disrupts the hegemony of the English language from the inside by celebrating the multilingualism possible within it.’— Asymptote‘Nimble and vivid, Bhattacharya’s slippery narrative slithers forward and sideways through time: an acute, idiosyncratic reading experience.’ — Publishers Weekly‘What is needed [now] is a kind of novel that attends to how society is being organized by certain vested interests; a novel that goes to the heart—rather, goes for the jugular—of the economic system itself. [Herbert] is prophetic of this tradition to come.’— Ratik Asokan, 4Columns‘[Herbert] reads like Rainer Maria Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge set in Calcutta. Featuring a young man with an open channel to the dead who drinks and grieves to excess, it is a mosaic of manic and immersive episodes. It is a spinning drunken stumble through a city that feels menacingly sensual.’— Nate McNamara, LitHub

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“Not writing is always a relief and sometimes a pleasure. Writing about what cannot be written, by contrast, is the devil’s own job.”In this unusual text, a blend of essay, fiction, and literary genealogy, South African novelist Ivan Vladislavic explores the problems and potentials of the fictions he could not bring himself to write. Drawing from his notebooks of the past twenty years, Vladislavic records here a range of ideas for stories—unsettled accounts, he calls them, or case studies of failure—and examines where they came from and why they eluded him. In the process, he reveals some of the principles that matter to him as a writer, and pays tribute to the writers— such as Walser, Perec, Sterne, and DeLillo—who have been important to him as both a reader and an author. At the heart of the text, like a brightly lit room in a field of debris, stands Vladislavic’s Loss Library itself, the shelves laden with books that have never been written. On the page, Vladislavic tells us, every loss may yet be recovered. An extraordinary book about both the nature of novels and the process of writing, The Loss Library will appeal to anyone seeking to understand the almost magical and mythical experience of breathing life into a new work of fiction. Praise for Vladislavic “In the tradition of Elias Canetti, a tour de force of the imagination.”—André Brink “The prose is stunning. It gives the impression of the words and the phrases having been caught from the inside—as though the author lives on the other side of language, where every word is strange and dancing, and the way they are put together produces complicated patterned exchanges like minuets.”—Tony Morphet

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Four classical Greek myths retold with unexpected twists by an East German dissident. Franz Fühmann’s subversive retellings of four Greek legends were first published in East Germany in 1980. In them, Fühmann plumbs the ancient tales’ depths and makes them his own. Attuned to conflict and paradox, he sheds light on the complexities of sex and love, art and beauty, politics and power. In the title story, the love of the goddess Eos for the mortal Tithonos reveals the blessing and curse of transience, while “Hera and Zeus” probes the divine couple’s tumultuous relationship and its devastating consequences for a world embroiled in war. Fühmann’s unflinching account of Marsyas’ flaying by Apollo has been widely read as a dissident political statement that has lost none of its incisive force. At times charged with sensuality, and at others honed to a keen analytical edge, Fühmann’s shimmering prose is matched by Sunandini Banerjee’s exquisite collages.

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In Paris, Montreal, Seville, Berlin, and towns large and small, Diane Meur has dreamt - and she has remembered her dreams. In this small volume the author shares her dreams of the years 2008-10, a time of global upheaval that happened to coincide with upheavals in her own life. As she writes in the preface, "They are not my life, they are not my writing, they are just the dreams I had, remembered, and noted down: all of them, and every part of them, without censure or omission." Some dreams are humorous: peeling a scorpion like a shrimp and finding it isn't half bad; some are poignant: a tiny doll-like baby encountered in a train; and, as in many dreams, there is much anxiety: old boyfriends encountered again; children in distress; unusual, threatening spaces and people. Though dreamt by the author, Meur's dreams share a common human intimacy - in them we recognize our own innermost thoughts, concerns, desires, and fears. Accompanied by the otherworldly illustrations of collage artist Sunandini Banerjee, Meur's dreams come alive, inspiring our own reveries and becoming part of our nocturnal imaginings.

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Cees Nooteboom wrote the poems that make up Monk's Eye on two islands: he began them on the Dutch island of Schiermonnikoog and finished them on the Spanish island of Minorca, where he has spent summers for decades. The poems--which can be read individually or, all together, as the record of a poet's life--are about the two islands. But they're also about islands as an archetype, about the serenity that we can find on beaches and amid dunes, the sea sweeping imperturbably around us. Accompanied by Sunandini Banerjee's collages, the poems in this volume are rich in allusion; they address the past, memories, illusions, dreams, and the heart of all poetry--which Nooteboom locates in the opening line of Plato's Phaedrus, when Socrates, walking with his admirer, asks, "My dear Phaedrus, whence came you, and whither are you going?"

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Science has given us several explanations for how humans evolved from walking on four limbs to two feet. None, however, is as riveting as what master storyteller Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o offers in The Upright Revolution. Blending myth and folklore with an acute insight into the human psyche and politics, Wa Thiong’o conjures up a fantastic fable about how and why humans began to walk upright. It is a story that will appeal to children and adults alike, containing a clear and important message: “Life is connected.” Originally written in Gikuyu, this short story has been translated into sixty-three languages—forty-seven of them African—making it the most translated story in the history of African literature. This new collector’s edition of The Upright Revolution is richly illustrated in full color with Sunandini Banerjee’s marvellous digital collages, which open up new vistas of imagination and add unique dimensions to the story.

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