Singing from the Well - Reinaldo Arenas

Title: Singing from the Well
Author: Reinaldo Arenas
ISBN: 978-0140094442
Binding: paper
Publisher: Penguin USA
Number of Pages: 206
Price: $ 10.00


His mother talks piously of the heaven that awaits the good, and disciplines him with an ox prod. His grandmother burns his precious crosses for kindling. His cousins meet to plot their grandfather's death. Yet in the hills surrounding his home, another reality exists, a place where his mother wears flowers in her hair, and his cousin Celestino, a poet who inscribes verse on the trunks of trees, understands his visions.

The first novel in Reinaldo Arenas's "secret history of Cuba," a quintet he called the Pentagonia, Singing from the Well is by turns explosively crude and breathtakingly lyrical. In the end, it is a stunning depiction of a childhood besieged by horror--and a moving defense of liberty and the imagination in a world of barbarity, persecution, and ignorance.

Imperium

Title: Imperium
Author: Ryszard kapuscinski
ISBN: 9781862079601
Binding: paper
Publisher: Granta
Number of Pages: 331
Price: Rs 399.00

From the Publisher
"A compelling and convincing narrative that examines the extensive damage done to entire nations, the human psyche and the physical environment....This is a devastating picture of Russia [that] penetrates deeply into the depressing truths of 70 years of Soviet rule, the borders, the fear, the inhumanity.... His portrait of the 'Imperium' is tragic, but ever so true."--Professor Thomas R. Beyer, Jr., Middlebury College, The Boston Globe

From the Inside Flap
By "the conjuror extraordinary of modern portage" (John le Carre)--a personal, brilliantly detailed exploration of the almost unfathomably complex Soviet empire. "When a writer of Mr. Kapuscinski's genius writes of the snows and the steppes of Siberia, of the doomed Aral Sea and Kiev . . . no pictures are necessary."--The Wall Street Journal. First time in paperback.

Imagining a Place for Buddhism

Title: Imagining a Place for Buddhism : Literary Culture and Religious Community in Tamil-Speaking South India
Author: Anne E. Monius
ISBN: 9788189059194
Binding: paperback
Date: 2009
Publisher: Navayana
Number of Pages:
Price: Rs 350/-

Non-Hindu communities such as Buddhists, Jains and Ājiīvakas played such an important role in South Indian literary and religious culture, and in the administration of the state between the fourth and seventh centuries that the later Śaiva traditions labeled this period the Kalabhra interregnum—the interruption of the wicked ones. Despite their presence in Tamil inscriptional, archaeological and literary record, their significance has been undermined in historical narratives that have valorised the triumph of Tamil Śaivism, casting Buddhists and Jains as ‘foreigners’ to be spurned, ridiculed and dismissed as anti-Tamil. In this pioneering study, focusing on two extant Buddhist Tamil texts – Maṇimēkalai (a sixth-century poetic narrative) and Vīracōliyam (an eleventh-century treatise on grammar and poetics) – Anne Monius, Professor of South Asian Religions at Harvard Divinity School, sheds light on the role of literature and literary culture in the formation, articulation and evolution of Tamil Buddhist religious identity and community.

The cover features S. Anvar’s photograph of a 12th century statue of the Buddha at the Paravai bus stop, Perambalur, Tamilnadu.