The Red Hen Anthology of Contemporary Indian Writing: Contemporary Indian Writing

(Paperback)

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Description

This anthology brings together one hundred contemporary Indian poets and fiction writers working in English as well as translating from other Indian languages. Located anywhere from Michigan to Mumbai, the sources of their creativity range from the ancient epics to twentieth-century world literature, with themes suggesting a modernist individuality and sense of displacement as well as an ironic, postmodern embracing of multiple disjunctions. The editors present a historical background to the various Englishes apparent in this collection, while also identifying the shared traditions and contexts that hold together their uniquely diverse selection. In aiming at coherence rather than unity, Hasan and Chattarji reveal that the idea of Indianness is as much a means of exploring difference as finding common ground.

Reviews

"Because there are no claims to defining Indianness, the book can be read in several individual parts. There is no chronology or alphabetical-based or language-based structuring to it, which in a way liberates the book instead of confining it. Future Library might prompt future editors to think of new ways to transcend linguistic boundaries and share Indian literature for its variety." Soni Wadhwa, Asian Review of Books

Author Bio

Anjum Hasan is the author of the novels The Cosmopolitans (Penguin), Neti, Neti (Roli Books), and Lunatic in my Head (Penguin); the book of poems Street on the Hill (Sahitya Akademi); the short story collections Difficult Pleasures (Penguin) and A Day in the Life (Penguin), which won the Valley of Words Fiction Award, 2019. Her books have also been shortlisted for the Sahitya Akademi, Hindu Best Fiction, and Crossword Fiction awards. She has been a Homi Bhabha Fellow and a Charles Wallace India Fellow, and is currently a New India Foundation Fellow. She lives in Bangalore. Sampurna Chattarji is a poet, fiction writer, translator, and editor. Her twenty books include the short story collection about Bombay/Mumbai, Dirty Love (Penguin); the novels Rupture and Land of the Well (HarperCollins); translations of Joy Goswamis poetryAfter Death Comes Water and Selected Poems (Harper Perennial); and nine poetry titles, the most recent being Space Gulliver: Chronicles of an Alien (HarperCollins) and Over & Under Ground in Mumbai & Paris (Westland-Context). Her translation of Sukumar Ray is a Puffin Classic. She teaches writing to design students at IIT, Bombay; and is Poetry Editor for The Indian Quarterly. She lives in Thane.