Narcopolis and Other Poems


Book Description




Narcopolis


Book Description

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize Written in poetic and affecting prose, Jeet Thayil's luminous debut novel charts the evolution of a great and broken metropolis across three decades. A rich, hallucinatory dream that captures Bombay in all its compelling squalor, Narcopolis completely subverts and challenges the literary traditions for which the Indian novel is celebrated. It is a book about drugs, sex, death, perversion, addiction, love, and God and has more in common in its subject matter with the work of William S. Burroughs or Baudelaire than with that of the subcontinent's familiar literary lights. Above all, it is a fantastical portrait of a beautiful and damned generation in a nation about to sell its soul.




These Errors Are Correct


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A meditation on grief, These Errors are Correct is Jeet Thayil's most intimate work to date. In poems of tenderness and rage, time blurs into a continuous present visited by Billy the Kid, the Buddha, Lata Mangeshkar, Jesus and Beethoven, by unnamed protagonists for whom faith and addiction are interchangeable, and by a remote god-like figure who will 'lick / your wound with his infected tongue'. A range of fixed and invented forms--rhymed syllabics, terza rima, ghazals, sonnets, the sestina, the canzone, stealth rhymes--make for a virtuosic, haunting collection. Originally published in 2008, the book has been out of print since 2010. With illustrations by the author, this new edition returns to the reader an essential and timeless book of poems. These Errors are Correct won the 2013 Sahitya Akademi Award.




English


Book Description

The narrator in these poems abandons the sectarian histories of 1990's Bombay for the relative clam of New York, only to find himself a witness to September the 11th, 2001. The author's poems refract his vibrant, unique experience through the prism of this tremendous intellect.




The Book of Chocolate Saints


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LONGLISTED FOR THE DSC PRIZE FOR SOUTH ASIAN LITERATURE 2018 'Easily the most original and formally inventive novel to come out of India in years.' Salman Rushdie, Guardian Francis Newton Xavier has lived a wild existence of excess in pursuit of his uncompromising aesthetic vision. His paintings and poems - which embody the flamboyant and decadent jeu d'esprit of his heroes like Baudelaire - have forged his reputation, which is to be celebrated at a new show in Delhi. Approaching middle age in a body ravaged by hard-living, Xavier leaves Manhattan following the 9/11 attacks with his young girlfriend - and his journey home to India becomes a delirious voyage into the past. From his formative years with an infamous school of fin de siècle Bombay poets - as documented by his biographer, Diswas, in these pages - Xavier must move forward into an uncertain future of salvation or damnation. His story results in The Book of Chocolate Saints: an epic novel of contemporary Indian life that probes the mysterious margins where art bleeds into the occult, and celebrates the artist's life itself as a final monument. It is Jeet Thayil's spiritual, passionate, and demented masterpiece.




The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets


Book Description

Jeet Thayil's definitive selection covers 55 years of Indian poetry in English. It is the first anthology to represent not just the major poets of the past half-century - the canonical writers who have dominated Indian poetry and publishing since the 1950s - but also the different kinds of poetry written by an extraordinary range of younger poets who live in many countries as well as in India. It is a groundbreaking global anthology of 70 poets writing in a common language responding to shared traditions, different cultures and contrasting lives in the changing modern world.Thayil's starting-point is Nissim Ezekiel, the first important modern Indian poet after Tagore, who published his first collection in London in 1952. Aiming for "verticality" rather than chronology, Thayil's anthology charts a poetry of astonishing volume and quality. It pays homage to major influences, including Ezekiel, Dom Moraes and Arun Kolatkar, who died within months of each other in 2004. It rediscovers forgotten figures such as Lawrence Bantleman and Gopal Honnalgere, and it serves as an introduction to the poets of the future.The book also shows that many Indian poets were mining the rich vein of 'chutnified' (Salman Rushdie's word) Indian English long before novelists like Rushdie and Upamanyu Chatterjee started using it in their fiction. It explains why Pankaj Mishra and Amit Chaudhuri have said that Indian poetry in English has a longer, more distinguished tradition than Indian fiction in English. The Indian poet now lives and works in New York, New Delhi, London, Itanagar, Bangalore, Berkeley, Goa, Sheffield, Lonavala, Montana, Aarhus, Allahabad, Hongkong, Montreal, Melbourne, Calcutta, Connecticut, Cuttack and various other global corridors. While some may have little in common in terms of culture (a number of the poets have never lived in India), this anthology shows how they are all bound by the intimate histories of a shared English language.




Low


Book Description

Ullis went to the bathroom and carefully unfolded the business card and placed it on the sink. Then he rolled up a note and snorted the last of his wife's ashes. Following the death of his wife, Dominic Ullis escapes to Bombay in search of oblivion and a dangerous new drug, Meow Meow. So begins a glorious weekend of misadventure as he tours the teeming, kaleidoscopic city from its sleek eyries of high-capital to the piss-stained streets, encountering a cast with their own stories to tell, but none of whom Ullis - his faculties ever distorted - is quite sure he can trust. Heady, heartbroken and heartfelt, Low is a blazing joyride through the darklands of grief towards obliteration - and, perhaps, epiphany. 'Jeet Thayil delights not just in pushing the bounds of possibility, but in smashing them to smithereens.' John Burnside




The Alchemy of Stars


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Since 1978 the Science Fiction Poetry Association has selected the best long and short poems in science fiction, fantasy, and horror for its annual Rhysling Awards, named in honor of the blind poet of the spaceways from Robert Heinlein 's The Green Hills of Earth. Often considered the equivalent for poetry of the Nebula Awards for fiction, the winning poems appear each year in the Nebula Awards anthologies. Now for the first time the Rhysling Winners have been gathered under one cover. This collection presents more than twenty-five years of the best poetry in the field of speculative literatur




The Lighthouse


Book Description

Futh, a middle-aged, recently separated man heads to Germany for a restorative walking holiday. During his circular walk along the Rhine, he contemplates the formative moments of his childhood. At the end of the week, Futh returns to what he sees as the sanctuary of the Hellhaus hotel, unaware of the events which have been unfolding there in his absence.




The Alchemy of Stars


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