The Best American Short Stories 2003


Book Description

Best-selling author Walter Mosley has selected the year's top fiction from voices well-known and new. Here several authors bring their stories to vivid life for a banner audio edition.




Women Filmmakers of the African & Asian Diaspora


Book Description

Black women filmmakers not only deserve an audience, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster asserts, but it is also imperative that their voices be heard as they struggle against Hollywood’s constructions of spectatorship, ownership, and the creative and distribution aspects of filmmaking. Foster provides a voice for Black and Asian women in the first detailed examination of the works of six contemporary Black and Asian women filmmakers. She also includes a detailed introduction and a chapter entitled "Other Voices," documenting the work of other Black and Asian filmmakers. Foster analyzes the key films of Zeinabu irene Davis, "one of a growing number of independent Black women filmmakers who are actively constructing [in the words of bell hooks] ‘an oppositional gaze’"; British filmmaker Ngozi Onwurah and Julie Dash, two filmmakers working with time and space; Pratibha Parmar, a Kenyan/Indian-born British Black filmmaker concerned with issues of representation, identity; cultural displacement, lesbianism, and racial identity; Trinh T. Minh-ha, a Vietnamese-born artist who revolutionized documentary filmmaking by displacing the "voyeuristic gaze of the ethnographic documentary filmmaker"; and Mira Nair, a Black Indian woman who concentrates on interracial identity.




Our Shared Storm


Book Description

Through speculative fiction, five interlocking novelettes explore the possible realities of our climate future. What is the future of our climate? Given that our summers now regularly feature Arctic heat waves and wildfire blood skies, polar vortex winters that reach all the way down to Texas, and “100-year” storms that hit every few months, it may seem that catastrophe is a done deal. As grim as things are, however, we still have options. Combining fiction and nonfiction and employing speculative tools for scholarly purposes, Our Shared Storm explores not just one potential climate future but five possible outcomes dependent upon our actions today. Written by speculative-fiction writer and sustainability researcher Andrew Dana Hudson, Our Shared Storm features five overlapping fictions to employ a futurist technique called “scenarios thinking.” Rather than try to predict how history will unfold—picking one out of many unpredictable and contingent branching paths—it instead creates a set of futures that represent major trends or counterposed possibilities, based on a set of climate-modeling scenarios known as the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs). The setting is the year 2054, during the Conference of the Parties global climate negotiations (a.k.a., The COP) in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Each story features a common cast of characters, but with events unfolding differently for them—and human society—in each alternate universe. These five scenarios highlight the political, economic, and cultural possibilities of futures where investments in climate adaptation and mitigation promised today have been successfully completed, kicked down the road, or abandoned altogether. From harrowing to hopeful, these stories highlight the choices we must make to stabilize the planet. Our Shared Storm is an experiment in deploying practice-based research methods to explore the opportunities and challenges of using climate fiction to engage scientific and academic frameworks.




The Indian English Novel of the New Millennium


Book Description

The Indian English Novel of the New Millennium is a book of sixteen pieces of scholarly critique on recent Indian novels written in the English language; some on specific literary trends in fictional writing and others on individual texts published in the twenty-first century by contemporary Indian novelists such as Amitav Ghosh, Kiran Desai, Aravind Adiga, K. N. Daruwalla, Upamanyu Chatterjee, David Davidar, Esterine Kire Iralu, Siddharth Chowdhury and Chetan Bhagat. The volume focuses closely on the defining features of the different emerging forms of the Indian English novel, such as narratives of female subjectivity, crime fiction, terror novels, science fiction, campus novels, animal novels, graphic novels, disability texts, LGBT voices, dalit writing, slumdog narratives, eco-narratives, narratives of myth and fantasy, philosophical novels, historical novels, postcolonial and multicultural narratives, and Diaspora novels. A select bibliography of recent Indian English novels from 2001–2013 has been given especially for the convenience of the researchers. The book will be of great interest and benefit to college and university students and teachers of Indian English literature.




To Be an Entrepreneur


Book Description

In To Be an Entrepreneur, Julia Qermezi Huang focuses on Bangladesh's iAgent social-enterprise model, the set of economic processes that animate the delivery of this model, and the implications for women's empowerment. The book offers new ethnographic approaches that reincorporate relational economics into the study of social enterprise. It details the tactics, dilemmas, compromises, aspirations, and unexpected possibilities that digital social enterprise opens up for women entrepreneurs, and reveals the implications of policy models promoting women's empowerment: the failure of focusing on individual autonomy and independence. While describing the historical and incomplete transition of Bangladesh's development models from their roots in a patronage-based moral economy to a market-based social-enterprise arrangement, Huang concludes that market-driven interventions fail to grasp the sociopolitical and cultural contexts in which poverty and gender inequality are embedded and sustained.




Around India in 80 Trains


Book Description

"Crackles and sparks with life like an exploding box of Diwali fireworks." -- William Dalrymple In 1991, Monisha Rajesh's family uprooted from Sheffield to Madras in the hope of making India their home. Two years later, fed up with soap-eating rats, severed human heads and the creepy colonel across the road, they returned to England with a bitter taste in their mouths. Two decades on, she turns to a map of the Indian Railways and takes a page out of Jules Verne's classic tale, embarking on an adventure around India in 80 trains, covering 40,000 km - the circumference of the Earth. She hopes that 80 train journeys up, down and across India will lift the veil on a country that has become a stranger to her. Along the way, Monisha discovers that the Indian Railways - featuring luxury trains, toy trains, Mumbai's infamous commuter trains, and even a hospital on wheels - have more than a few stories to tell, not to mention a colourful cast of characters. And with a self-confessed "militant devout atheist" in tow, her personal journey around a country built on religion isn't quite what she bargained for...




Inside-Outside


Book Description

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The Birth of the Khalsa


Book Description

Sikhs trace the genesis of their religious rites, prayers, dress codes, and names to Guru Gobind Singh's creation of the Khalsa in 1699. The Birth of the Khalsa is the first work to explore this pivotal event in Sikh history from a feminist perspective, questioning the ways in which Sikh memories have constructed a hypermasculine Sikh identity. The book argues that Sikh memory needs to acknowledge the vital female dimension grounded in the universal human condition and present at the birth of the Khalsa. Inspired by her own father, the eminent Sikh scholar Harbans Singh, Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh rediscovers the feminine side of the words and actions of the founders of Sikhism. She looks at the basic texts and tenets of Sikh religion and demonstrates the female aspect in the sacred text, daily prayers, dress code, and rituals of the Sikhs. Singh reminds us that Guru Gobind Singh's original vision was an egalitarian one and urges present-day Sikhs to live up to the liberating implications set in motion when he gave birth to the Khalsa.




Brilliance of Hinduism


Book Description

ÿHinduism is not a religion in the stricktest sense of the term, but it is a way of life. A religion is that which has one religious book and one founder like Christianity and Islam. When we look at Hinduism it is like a vast and huge banyan tree, under which many religions took their root and prospered. If such religions could not make much headway or declined, it was not due to Hinduism, but due to their own limitations and deficiencies. In this book, I have laid stress on some exclusive characteristic features of Hinduism which distinguish it from other religions, though some fundamental traits are common to almost all the religions. I have tried my best to avoid controversial topics, especially that create dissensions amongst other religions but, even then, some references were unavoidable. But there is no overt or covert intention to deride and demean any religion. When salient features of a religion are mentioned, comparison cannot be avoided, nor even over looked, as comparative study enables us to discern between good and bad.




The Complete Works of Rabindranath Tagore. Illustrated


Book Description

Rabindhranath Tagore reshaped Bengali literature and music as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of the "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful" poetry of Gitanjali, he became in 1913 the first non-European and the first lyricist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Referred to as "the Bard of Bengal", Tagore was known by sobriquets: Gurudev, Kobiguru, Biswakobi. Tagore's poetic songs were viewed as spiritual and mercurial; however, his "elegant prose and magical poetry" remain largely unknown outside Bengal. Poetry 1. Ama and Vinayaka 2. Baul Songs 3. Collected Poems 3.1. Boro-Budur 3.2. The Child 3.3. Freedom 3.4. From Hindi Songs of Jnanadas 3.5. Fulfilment 3.6. Krishnakali 3.7. The New Year 3.8. Raidas, the Sweeper 3.9. Santiniketan Song 3.10. Shesher Kobita 3.11. The Son of Man 3.12. This Evil Day 3.13. W.W. Pearson 4. Fruit-Gathering 5. The Fugitive The Fugitive I The Fugitive II The Fugitive III 6. Gitanjali 7. Kacha and Devayani 8. Karna and Kunti 9. Lover’s Gift 10. The Mother’s Prayer 11. Other Poems 12. Somaka and Ritvik 13. Songs of Kabir 14. Stray Birds 15. Vaishnava Songs Short Stories 1. A Feast for Rats 2. The Auspicious Vision 3. The Babus of Nayanjore 4. The Cabuliwallah 5. The Castaway 6. The Child’s Return 7. The Devotee 8. The Editor 9. The Elder Sister 10. Emancipation 11. Exercise-book 12. Finally 13. The Fugitive Gold 14. The Gift of Vision 15. Giribala 16. Haimanti: Of Autumn 17. Holiday 18. The Home-Coming 19. The Hungry Stones 20. In the Night 21. The Kingdom of Cards 22. Living or Dead? 23. The Lost Jewels 24. Mashi 25. Master Mashai 26. My Fair Neighbour 27. My Lord, the Baby 28. Once there was a King 29. The Parrot’s Training 30. The Patriot 31. The Postmaster 32. Raja and Rani 33. The Renunciation 34. The Riddle Solved 35. The River Stairs 36. Saved 37. The Skeleton 38. The Son of Rashmani 39. Subha 40. The Supreme Night 41. Unwanted 42. The Victory 43. Vision 44. We Crown Thee King Novels 1. The Broken Ties (Nastanirh) 2. The Home and the World 3. The Religion of Man Plays 1. Autumn-Festival 2. Chitra 3. The Cycle of Spring 4. The Gardener 5. The King and the Queen 6. The King of the Dark Chamber 7. Malini 8. The Post Office 9. Red Oleanders 10. Sacrifice 11. Sanyasi or the Ascetic 12. The Trial 13. The Waterfall Essays 1. The Center of Indian Culture 2. Creative Unity 2.1. An Eastern University 2.2. An Indian Folk Religion 2.3. The Creative Ideal 2.4. East and West 2.5. The Modern Age 2.6. The Nation 2.7. The Poet’s Religion 2.8. The Religion of the Forest 2.9. The Spirit of Freedom 2.10. Woman and Home 3. Nationalism 3.1. Nationalism in India 3.2. Nationalism in Japan 3.3. Nationalism in the West 3.4. The Sunset of the Century 4. Sadhana 4.1. The Problem of Evil 4.2. The Problem of Self 4.3. Realization in Action 4.4. Realization in Love 4.5. The Realization of Beauty 4.6. The Realization of the Infinite 4.7. The Relation of the Individual to the Universe 4.8. Soul Consciousness 5. The Spirit of Japan Non-Fiction 1. Glimpses of Bengal Introduction 1885 1887 1888 1890 1891 1892 1893 1894 1895 2. My Reminiscences Part 1 1. My Reminiscences 2. Teaching Begins 3. Within and Without Part 2 4. Servocracy 5. The Normal School 6. Versification 7. Various Learning 8. My First Outing 9. Practising Poetry Part 3 10. Srikantha Babu 11. Our Bengali Course Ends 12. The Professor 13. My Father 14. A journey with my Father 15. At the Himalayas Part 4 16. My Return 17. Home Studies 18. My Home Environment 19. Literary Companions 20. Publishing 21. Bhanu Singha 22. Patriotism 23. The Bharati Part 5 24. Ahmedabad 25. England 26. Loken Palit 27. The Broken Heart Part 6 28. European Music 29. Valmiki Pratibha 30. Evening Songs 31. An Essay on Music 32. The River-side 33. More about the Evening Songs 34. Morning Songs Part 7 35. Rajendrahal Mitra 36. Karwar 37. Nature’s Revenge 38. Pictures and Songs 39. An Intervening Period 40. Bankim Chandra Part 8 41. The Steamer Hulk 42. Bereavements 43. The Rains and Autumn 44. Sharps and Flats