Days and Nights of Love and War

Title: Days and Nights of Love and War
Author: Eduardo Galeano
ISBN: 978-81-89833-70-1
Binding: paperback
Publisher: Aakar books
Number of Pages: 178
Price: Rs 225

Days and Nights of Love and War is the personal testimony of one of Latin America’s foremost contemporary writers. In this fascinating journal and eloquent history, Eduardo Galeano movingly records the lives and struggles of the Latin American people, under two decades of unimaginable violence and extreme repression. Alternating between reportage, personal vignettes, interviews, travelougues, and folklore, and richly conveyed with anger, sadness, irony and occasional humor, Galeano pays loving tribute to the courage and determination of those who continued to believe in, and fight for, a more human existence.


Originally published in Cuba, Days and Nights of Love and War won the Casa de las Amèricas prize (1978).


Lannan Foundation awarded the 1999 Cultural Prize for Freedom to Eduardo Galeano, in recognition of those “whose extraordinary and courageous work celebrates the human right to freedom of imagination, inquiry and expression

Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone

Title: Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone
Author: Eduardo Galeano
ISBN: 9781846272479
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Portobello
Number of Pages: 391
Price: Rs 599.00

In Mirrors, Galeano smashes aside the narrative of conventional history and arranges the shards into a new pattern, to reveal the past in radically altered form.

From the Garden of Eden to twenty-first century cityscapes, we glimpse fragments in the lives of those who have been overlooked by traditional histories: the artists, the servants, the gods and the visionaries, the black slaves who built the White House, and the women who were bartered for dynastic ends.

Combining unimpeachably vast knowledge with irresistible fireside storytelling skills, Galeano’s world history is completely unique: a ground-breaking, mind-changing mosaic made of lives lived on our sorry, sparkling planet.

About the Author
Eduardo Galeano's works, which have been translated into 28 languages, include Memory of Fire; Soccer in Sun and Shadow; Days and Nights of Love and War; The Book of Embraces; Open Veins; and Voices of Time. Born in Montevideo, he fled in 1973 after the military coup’s leaders imprisoned him, and lived in exile first in Argentina until death threats there forced him onward to Spain, until returning to Uruguay in 1985 upon the collapse of the military dictatorship. He has lived there since, active in journalism, television and politics. He was awarded the first Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom.

Walter Benjamin's Archive: images, texts and signs

Title: Walter Benjamin's Archive: images, texts and signs
Author: Walter Benjamin
ISBN: 9781844671960
Binding: Cloth
Publisher: Verso
Number of Pages: 306
Price: £16.99

The works of the great literary and cultural critic Walter Benjamin are a reservoir of texts, commentaries, scraps and fragments of everyday life, arts and dreams. This beautifully designed book gives an insight into Benjamin's habits of collecting and archiving through some of his most personal documents. From notebooks in which every conceivable space is covered with handwriting, and a heartfelt traveller's series of postcards, to a sequence of Benjamin's own photographs, and lists that include a collection of his son Stefan's early words and sentences, this wonderful collection testifies to Benjamin's complex and kaleidoscopic passion for the ephemera of human life. Illustrated throughout in color and b/w

Archaeologies of future

Title: Archaeologies of future
Author: Frederic Jameson
ISBN: 978 1 84467 538 8
Binding: Paper
Publisher: VFerso
Number of Pages: 480
Price: £14.99

Fredric Jameson is America’s leading Marxist critic. A prodigiously energetic thinker whose writings sweep majestically from Sophocles to science fiction.” — Terry Eagleton

In an age of globalization characterized by the dizzying technologies of the First World, and the social disintegration of the Third, is the concept of utopia still meaningful? Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson’s most substantial work since Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, investigates the development of this form since Thomas More, and interrogates the functions of utopian thinking in a post-Communist age.

The relationship between utopia and science fiction is explored through the representations of otherness … alien life and alien worlds … and a study of the works of Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin, William Gibson, Brian Aldiss, Kim Stanley Robinson and more. Jameson’s essential essays, including “The Desire Called Utopia,” conclude with an examination of the opposing positions on utopia and an assessment of its political value today.

Archaeologies of the Future is the third volume, after Postmodernism and A Singular Modernity, of Jameson’s project on the Poetics of Social Forms.

Praise for A Singular Modernity
“This is Jameson’s most important and comprehensive account of the theoretical implication and the question of modernity/postmodernity since his path-breaking Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” — Choice

Praise for Brecht and Method
“There is no better example of a “Marxist scholastic” than Fredric Jameson.” — The Economist

“Perhaps the secret of Jameson’s greatness, like Brecht’s, is that he doesn’t adhere to his method too strictly.” — In These Times

Title: Valences of the dialectic
Author: Frederic Jameson
ISBN: 9781859848777
Binding: Hard bound
Publisher: Verso
Number of Pages: 625
Price: £29.99


A comprehensive analysis of the philosophy of the dialectic by the doyen of cultural criticism

One of the most accomplished literary and cultural critics in the world, Fredric Jameson returns to the philosophy of the dialectic in a grand and nuanced study of the concept and those who have developed it. The question of the dialectic remains at the center of contemporary theoretical debates: Is it Hegelian and idealistic? To what degree is it central to Marxism? Is a materialist dialectic really possible? How damaging are the “poststructuralist” critiques of the dialectic by Deleuze, and Laclau and Mouffe? Valences of the Dialectic addresses these questions, and studies individual thinkers both dialectical and anti-dialectical, from Hegel and Fichte to Heidegger, Sartre, Derrida, Deleuze and Lacan.

“One of the great writers of our time, not just one of the most formidably gifted critics and cultural theorists.” — Terry Eagleton, London Review of Books

Praise for Archaeologies of the Future:

“Jameson’s skill in connecting diverse materials and theories, the suggestiveness of his insights, and his passionate conviction make this an exciting work.” — Times Literary Supplement

Fredric Jameson is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. He is the author of numerous books, including Archaeologies of the Future, The Modernist Papers, A Singular Modernity; and Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.

Changing my mind

Title: Changing my mind: Occasional essays
Author: Zadie Smith
ISBN: 9780241142967
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Penguin
Number of Pages: 307
Price:Rs 550

Zadie Smith brings to her essays all of the curiosity, intellectual rigor, and sharp humor that have attracted so many readers to her fiction, and the result is a collection that is nothing short of extraordinary.

Split into four sections—“Reading,” “Being,” “Seeing,” and “Feeling”—Changing My Mind invites readers to witness the world from Zadie Smith’s unique vantage. Smith casts her acute eye over material both personal and cultural, with wonderfully engaging essays—some published here for the first time—on diverse topics including literature, movies, going to the Oscars, British comedy, family, feminism, Obama, Katharine Hepburn, and Anna Magnani.

In her investigations Smith also reveals much of herself. Her literary criticism shares the wealth of her experiences as a reader and exposes the tremendous influence diverse writers—E. M. Forster, Zora Neale Hurston, George Eliot, and others—have had on her writing life and her self-understanding. Smith also speaks directly to writers as a craftsman, offering precious practical lessons on process. Here and throughout, readers will learn of the wide-ranging experiences—in novels, travel, philosophy, politics, and beyond—that have nourished Smith’s rich life of the mind. Her probing analysis offers tremendous food for thought, encouraging readers to attend to the slippery questions of identity, art, love, and vocation that so often go neglected.

Changing My Mind announces Zadie Smith as one of our most important contemporary essayists, a writer with the rare ability to turn the world on its side with both fact and fiction. Changing My Mind is a gift to readers, writers, and all who want to look at life more expansively.

Tropical Truth: A Story Of Music And Revolution In Brazil

Title: Tropical Truth: A Story Of Music And Revolution In Brazil
Author: Caetano Veloso
ISBN: 9780747568018
Binding: paper
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Number of Pages: 354
Price: £7.75

From Publishers Weekly

The Brazilian singer/songwriter most highly regarded by the First World intelligentsia, Veloso makes his U.S. publishing debut with a rambling, extremely erudite memoir focusing on his role in the late-1960s musical happening known as Tropic lia. While on the surface, Tropic lia and Veloso (often compared to Bob Dylan) paralleled the U.S. counterculture of the 1960s, the author explains the multilayered context of Brazilian politics and art that made the movement unique. From the innocence of his middle-class youth in the northern state of Bahia, to his stays in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Veloso vividly re-creates his formative years, which were immersed in French new wave cinema, progressive English rock and Brazilian letters, particularly concrete poetry. "What we wanted to do would be... closer to Godard's films," he muses. "Masculin-feminin [sic], with... its adolescent sexuality-I saw it as one more moment in our daily lives in Sao Paulo." That Veloso is well-read is not in question-he cites everyone from Wittgenstein and Proust to Deleuze and Andrew Sullivan, while at the same time introducing non-Brazilian readers to an unknown canon of authors such as poet Augusto de Campos and essayist Oswald de Andrade. If there is any complaint with the book, it is that Veloso can get caught up in a maze of sometimes unconnected ideas that obscure his lucid descriptions of the intricacies of Brazilian music and its often equally literate stars. However, this is a must for Brazilian music fans, as well as anyone interested in how the modernist age played out in South America.

Envy

Title: Envy
Author: Yury Olesha
ISBN: 0-88233-091-8
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Ardis
Number of Pages: 315
Price: $12.95

Translated with an introduction by T.S. Berczynski

First published in 1927, Yury Olesha's Envy is, both stylistically and thematically one of the most provocative novels from the soviet era. Andrei Babichev is a paragon of Soviet values, an innovative and practical man, Director of the Food Industry Trust, a man whose vision encompasses such future advances for mankind as the 35-kopeck sausage and the self-peeling potao. Out of kindness, he rescues from the gutter Nikolai Karalerov, violently tossed from a bar after a drunken and self-destructive tirade. But instead of gratitude, Babichev finds himslf the subject of an endlessly malignant jealousy, as Kavaelrov sees in him a representative of the new bredd of man who has prevented him from realizing his true greatness. A scathing social satire, Envy is a concise and incisive exploration of the paradigmatic conflicts of the early Soviet age: old versus new, imagination versus pragmatism, and the alienation of the romantic artist in the age of technology.

Critics as far apart as Gleb Struve ("One of the most interesting and original works in the whole of Soviet literature") and Pravda ("Olesha's style is masterful, his psychological analysis infinitely subtle, his portrayal of negative characters truly striking") have praised the novel, and one of the signs of its universality is the fact that it has been claimed by nearly every school of critics and interpreted as everything from a submerged homosexual story to a 10th century Noes from the Underground.

A CAPTIVE SPIRIT :Collected Prose by Marina Tsvetaeva

Title:A CAPTIVE SPIRIT : Collected Prose
Author: Marina Tsvetaeva
Introduction by Susan Sontag
Translated and edited by J. Marin King
ISBN: 0-88233-353-4
Binding: Paper
Publisher:Ardis
Number of Pages: 491
Price:$ 16.95

Captive Spirit shows Marina Tsvetaeva's genius at the peak of its power. The selections are from her mature period, the 1930s, and include almost all of her autobiographical writings, her major literary portraits, and her literary criticism.

Exiled in Paris and isolated in the emigre community during this period, Tsvetaeva became increasingly aware of the importance of biography, history, and myth. Her famous portraits of Maximilian Voloshin and Andrei Bely reveal her remarkable capacities as an eyewitness, while her moving accounts of her father and mother, sisters and brother, seen through a child's eyes, comprise the most lyrical of family chronicles. The final section of the book, juxtaposing two works of literary criticism, demostrates her formidable critical and analytical intelligence.

Tsvetaeva composed her prose to be read aloud, and these essays, full of extraordinary vitality, reflect the urgency of one who writes to discover the essential truths hidden in the past. A Captive Spirit is a remarkable collection of work from, as Vladimir Nabokov described her, "a writer of genius."

"The Russianness of Tsvetaeva's poetry and prose-singularly direct and forceful are they are—consists in an obvious authenticity of the emotions. Everything is felt instantly and strongly; everything is strashny and vesely—terrible and joyful—and yet about this directness there is nothing histrionic, sloppy, or self-indulgent." —JOHN BAYLEY, The New York Review of Books

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.

Othappu : The Scent of the Other Side

Title: Othappu : The Scent of the Other Side
Author: Sarah Joseph , Valson Thampu (Translator)
ISBN: 9780198062165
Binding: Hardback
Date: June 2009
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Number of Pages: 330

Price: Rs. 395

This transfiguring work opens with Sister Margalitha leaving the Convent in search of God. When she decides to live with Karikkan, a priest who has abandoned his vocation, she offends her family, society, the Church, and the law. The scandal rocks Thrissur, and the couple become social outcasts.

Othappu, the first Malayalam novel of its kind, is about a woman’s yearning for a true understanding of spirituality and her own sexuality. The novel is a powerful indictment of the hypocrisy that plagues Christianity in many parts of the Subcontinent. Othappu unfolds at many levels to critique notions of class, caste, antiquity, and prestige that have, over time, eroded the power of the first Church.

The detailed Introduction by Jancy James provides rare insights into the work and skillfully sketches the social history of Kerala, the location of the novel. Two special inclusions— Paul Zacharia on the different meanings of ‘othappu’ and a dialogue between the author and Githa Hiranyan—lend fresh perspectives to the work.

Philosophy and Social by Rorty

Title: Philosophy and Social Hope
Author: Richard Rorty
ISBN: 9780140262889
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin
Number of Pages: 320
Price: £6.99

Since Plato most philosophy has aimed at true knowledge, penetrating beneath appearances to an underlying reality. Against this tradition, Richard Rorty convincingly argues, pragmatism offers a new philosophy of hope. One of the most controversial figures in recent philosophical and wider literary and cultural debate, Rorty brings together an original collection of his most recent philosophical and cultural writings. He explains in a fascinating memoir how he began to move away from Plato towards William James and Dewey, culminating in his own version of pragmatism. What ultimately matters, Rorty suggests, is not whether our ideas correspond to some fundamental reality but whether they help us carry out practical tasks and create a fairer and more democratic society.

Aimed at a general audience, this volume offers a stimulating summary of Rorty's central philosophical beliefs, as well as some challenging insights into contemporary culture, justice, education, and love.

Dog Heart by Breyten Breytenbach

Title: Dog Heart
Author: Breyten Breytenbach
ISBN: 9780571200665
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Number of Pages: 208
Original Price: £9.99
Our Price: £ 6.99

'What I want to write is the penetration, expansion, skirmishing, coupling, mixing, separation, regrouping of peoples and cultures - the glorious bastardization of men and women mutually shaped by sky and rain and wind and soil.'

The leading Afrikaaner poet and anti-apartheid campaigner, Breyten Breytenbach returns to South Africa from Parisian exile and finds himself excavating both his family's history and that of his nation, through a series of contemporary sketches and haunting reminiscences which are highly coloured, strongly poetic, and often unsettling. We encounter the 'New South Africa', where efforts at a formal process of Truth and Reconciliation teeter uneasily atop a legacy of terrible and enduring violence.

The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist

Title:The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist
Author: Breyten Breytenbach
ISBN: 9780571136162
Binding:Paperback
Publisher:Faber and faber
Number of Pages:416
Original price: £9.99
Our Price:£ 6.99

A memoir of Breytenbach’s seven years in South Africa’s prisons - two of them in solitary confinement - this book captures the full horror of life in one of the worst penal systems in the world.

About The Author

Breyten Breytenbach was born in South Africa in 1939. He left South Africa in 1959 to travel throughout Europe, settling in Paris in 1961. He rapidly established himself as a leading Afrikaner poet of his generation, as well as a painter of distinction. Whilst in Europe he became active in the anti-apartheid movement, and it was during a return visit to South Africa in 1975 that he was arrested. He was convicted of terrorism and sentenced to nine years imprisonment. He was eventually found not guilty of the charges, but remained a political prisoner until 1982. Following his release, he returned to Paris, where he still lives with his wife, and obtained French citizenship.

In 1992 he co-founded the Goree Institute in Senegal, and in 1995 he co-founded the Centre for Creative Arts at the University of Natal. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Natal, Princeton University, the University of Cape Town, and New York University.

Breyten Breytenbach has won numerous awards for his writing and his painting, and his books have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (Illustrated)

Title: The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology
Author: Ed by Donald Preziosi
ISBN 10: 0192842420
ISBN-13: 978-0192842428
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Number of Pages: 608
Price: £16.99

The history of art has been written and rewritten since classical antiquity. Since the foundation of the modern discipline of art history in Germany in the late eighteenth century, debates about art and its histories have intensified. Historians, philosophers, psychologists, and anthropologists among others have changed our notions of what art history has been, is, and might be.

The Art of Art History is a unique guide to understanding art history through a critical reading of the field's most innovative and influential texts over the past two centuries. Each section focuses on a key issue: aesthetics, style, history as an art, iconography and semiology, gender, modernity and postmodernity, deconstruction and museology. More than thirty readings from writers as diverse as Winckelmann, Kant, Gombrich, Warburg, Panofsky, Heidegger, Lisa Tickner, Meyer Schapiro, Jacques Derrida, Mary Kelly, Michel Foucault, Rosalind Krauss, Louis Marin, Margaret Iversen, and Nestor Canclini are brought together, and Donald Preziosi's introductions to each topic provide background information, bibliographies, and critical elucidations of the issues at stake. His own concluding essay is an important and original contribution to scholarship in the field.

My teaching by Jacques Lacan

Title: My teaching
Author: Jacques Lacan
ISBN: 978 1 84467 271 4
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Verso
Number of Pages: 128
Price: £8.99

Bringing together three previously unpublished lectures presented to the public by Lacan at the height of his career, My Teaching is a clear, concise introduction to the thought of the influential psychoanalyst. Drawing on examples from popular culture and common sense, this lively book explores a range of Lacan’s most important ideas, including his debt to Freud, linguistic unconsciousness and sexuality in its relation to psychoanalytic truth. Engaging, witty and personal, My Teaching offers a rare opportunity to engage directly with Lacan's own general explanation of his teaching to a non-psychoanalytic audience.

The Rapids of a Great River: The Penguin Book of Tamil Poetry

Title: The Rapids of a Great River: The Penguin Book of Tamil Poetry
Author: Ed By Lakshmi Holmstrom Edited By Subashree Krishnaswamy
ISBN: 9780670082810
Binding: Hard back
Publisher: Penguin/Wiking
Number of Pages: 260
Price: INR 499/-

The Rapids of a Great River begins with selections from the earliest known Tamil poetry dating from the second century CE. The writings of the Sangam period laid the foundation for the Tamil poetic tradition, and they continue to underlie and inform the works of Tamil poets even today. The first part of this anthology traverses the Sangam and bhakti periods and closes with pre-modern poems from the nineteenth century. The second part, a compilation of modern and contemporary poetry, opens with the work of the revolutionary poet Subramania Bharati. Breaking free from prescriptions, the new voices—which include Sri Lankan Tamils, women and dalits, among others—address the contemporary reader; the poems, underscored by a sharp rhetorical edge, grapple with the complexities of the modern political and social world.

The selection is wide-ranging and the translations admirably echo the music, pace and resonance of the poems. This anthology links the old with the new, cementing the continuity of a richly textured tradition. There is something in the collection for every reader and each will make his or her own connections—at times startling, at other times familiar.

Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory

Title: Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory
Author: Ed by Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, Sarah Stanbury
ISBN-10: 0231105452
ISBN-13: 978-0231105453
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Number of Pages: 384

Price: $29.00

In many fields, the body is the topic generating exciting new research and interdisciplinary inquiry. Feminist theorists, in particular, have focused on the female body as the site where representations of difference and identity are inscribed. Drawn from a broad range of disciplines, explores the tensions between women's lived bodily experiences and the cultural meanings inscribed on the female body. The volume includes classic and contemporary essays on rape, pornography, eroticism, anorexia, body building, menstruation, and maternity, and challenges racial, class, and sexual categories. Complemented by the editor's introduction, is a comprehensive sourcebook on the major theoretical positions and critical trends surrounding the female body.