Pastiche novels are a guilty pleasure. Who are you going to admit to that you enjoyed reading about Leia and Hans Solo’s children in the Star Wars novel series? Just as you may secretly enjoy puns but are publicly obliged to groan and condemn them. But that’s about the consumer of pastiches. The writer of...

Twenty-nine-year-old, Bengaluru- based artist George Mathen’s first graphic novel Moonward promises a dark and elaborately constructed fantastical universe quite unlike other Indian graphic novels seen in recent times. NISHA SUSAN interviews Appupen alias Mathen: Moonward is part of a series? Moonward is a standalone graphic novel but also the prologue to a series. Here I...

The award-winning New York-based Akashic Noir Books left American neighbourhoods a while ago with anthologies set in Asia and Europe. The first of the series set in India, the Delhi Noir anthology, is coming here through HarperCollins in August. These all-new stories attempt to provide an alternate, gritty map of the capital. The following are...

In some ways, Stranger to History was written before Aatish Taseer was born. It was written when Aatish’s mother, journalist Tavleen Singh fell in love with a visiting Pakistani, Salman Taseer, who already had a wife and three children. It was written when Salman Taseer met Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in London and became a great...

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is at home in Allahabad working on a fresh tranlation of Kabir because, he says, no poet (as opposed to academic) has translated Kabir since Tagore.Mehrotra once said that if poets are struck down by one generation of readers they are sure to bounce back with the next. It is a truth...

It was in reading the feminist canon that I was first lured away from the unabashed pursuit of fiction. And Marilyn French was a presiding deity. must have been 19 when I first read The Women’s Room. It was an old Abacus edition with an afterword by Susan Faludi. I could see the patches of...

Though we spend a greater part of our lives working, few novels really examine work. In recent times Joshua Ferris explored (with a poetic first person plural voice) the tender, comical insides of an ad agency in the throes of recession. In And Then We Came to The End, Ferris dwelt on the idiosyncracies of...

Mridula Koshy, writer, coffee-shop lurker, writing group fiend, union organiser and mother of three has a collection of short stories, If It Is Sweetout next month. Look out, world. You can read the story she wrote for Tehelka’s Fiction special here. A prize-winning story here. And fabulous recommendations: In these stories, families are seen in...

Conversation with Lijia Zhang, author of Socialism is Great! and owner of a shirt that everyone coveted. Until recently, there was no word in Chinese to describe fans because there were no celebrities. “We have one now. They are called ‘glass noodles’,” says Lijia Zhang, author of Socialism is Great. The 44-year-old Zhang gets wedding...

If you have not bought a 2009 diary yet, perhaps you could buy this one. The Zubaan 2009 diary takes off from the boxing feature* that Uzma Mohsin and I worked on a few months ago. It features fantastic images by Uzma and some writing by me. It would make a fun gift. *PRIYANKA MAJHI...

Ok I hate Story # 5. 7000 words down and it sucks like a vacuum cleaner. I am rapidly considering a career in something more rewarding like camel-jockeying. Meanwhile people are doing fun things elsewhere. Meet Jonathan Ames, the Literary Dick (as in private detective, he adds) Was Elizabeth Bishop the model for Lakey in...

Jenny Crusie says: The problem with being a writer (one of many) is that it’s all in our heads. It’s not like ditch digging where you can fume all day and still have a perfectly good ditch when you break for dinner. Parvati Sharma, punctuater extraordinaire, and a crazy dancer after my own heart has...