Bollywood Bargain

The last thing Raine O'Shea wants is an arranged marriage to wealthy Bollywood Actor, Dev Shukla. Her last chance for true love died with her husband… Right? Raine just lost the love of her life. If she wants to keep custody of her stepson, she needs to accept a marriage arranged by her late husband's family. But while she's willing to accept another man's proposal, she's not certain she could ever open her heart again. Surely her last chance for true love died along with her husband… Right? Bollywood actor Devaj Shukla doesn't have any desire to marry his cousin's widow. But once his mother plays the tradition card, and reminds him of the romantic scandals in his life that would disappear if he got married, he realizes he can't refuse. Besides, he loves the little glimpses of Raine's feisty personality he sees peeking through her pain every now and then. Perhaps an arranged marriage won't be so bad after all. Before they can consider their future together, they must first face their pasts--and the secrets that still stand between them. When all is said and done, the real question becomes whether or not this marriage will lead to happy ever after...or heartbreak...

She’ll wear the CEO’s ring, but can she ever hope to have more? Find out in this gripping marriage of convenience romance by Tara Pammi! Promoted from his protégé… To his convenient wife! After admitting her forbidden feelings for her boss, Caio Oliveira, coding genius Anushka Reddy is mortified! The only sensible idea is to get a one-way ticket out of town! But then he comes to her with a proposal… This is no romantic gesture. It’s a simple deal to secure the business they’ve both poured everything into. Yet on Caio’s Brazilian island, the sparks between them become uncontainable! How does Anushka tell Caio that his ring, his jet-set world, even his scorching touch, will never be enough…if his heart is off-limits? From Harlequin Presents: Escape to exotic locations where passion knows no bounds. Read all the Billion-Dollar Fairy Tales books: Book 1: Marriage Bargain with Her Brazilian Boss Book 2: The Reason for His Wife's Return

Bollywood’s New Woman examines Bollywood’s construction and presentation of the Indian Woman since the 1990s. The groundbreaking collection illuminates the contexts and contours of this contemporary figure that has been identified in sociological and historical discourses as the “New Woman.” On the one hand, this figure is a variant of the fin de siècle phenomenon of the “New Woman” in the United Kingdom and the United States. In the Indian context, the New Woman is a distinct articulation resulting from the nation’s tryst with neoliberal reform, consolidation of the middle class, and the ascendency of aggressive Hindu Right politics.

A spectacular collection that celebrates Bollywood’s most enduring superstars Hindi cinema has wielded a hypnotic charm over viewers for close to a century, with its melodious music, colourful drama and lively plotlines. But at the heart of its mystique is the galaxy of stars who continue to mesmerize audiences. Bollywood’s Top 20 is a definitive collection of original essays, paying tribute to the biggest stars of all time—from Ashok Kumar, Dilip Kumar, Dev Anand, Raj Kapoor, Nargis and Madhubala to Rajesh Khanna, Amitabh Bachchan, Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan, Kajol and Kareena Kapoor. Each piece offers unique insights into the struggles and triumphs, downfalls and scandals, and the inscrutable X factor of these talented actors that turned them into demigods and divas.

Bollywood is India's most popular entertainment and one of its most powerful social forces. Its blockbusters contest ideas about state formation, capture the nation's dispersed anxieties, and fabricate public fantasies of what constitutes "India." Written by an award-winning scholar of popular culture and postcolonial modernity, Bollywood's India analyzes the role of the cinema's most popular blockbusters in making, unmaking, and remaking modern India. With dazzling interpretive virtuosity, Priya Joshi provides an interdisciplinary account of popular cinema as a space that filters politics and modernity for its viewers. Themes such as crime and punishment, family and individuality, vigilante and community capture the diffuse aspirations of an evolving nation. Summoning India's tumultuous 1970s as an interpretive lens, Joshi reveals the cinema's social work across decades that saw the decline of studios, the rise of the multi-starrer genre, and the arrival of corporate capital and new media platforms. In elegantly crafted studies of iconic and less familiar films, including Awara (1951), Ab Dilli Dur Nahin (1957), Deewaar (1975), Sholay (1975), Dil Se (1998), A Wednesday (2008), and 3 Idiots (2009), Joshi powerfully conveys the pleasures and politics of Bollywood blockbusters.

Listening with a Feminist Ear is a study of the cultural politics and possibilities of sound in cinema. Eschewing ocularcentric and siloed disciplinary formations, the book takes seriously the radical theoretical and methodological potential of listening. It models a feminist interpretive practice that is not just attuned to how power and privilege are materialized in sound, but that engenders new, counter-hegemonic imaginaries. Focusing on mainstream Bombay cinema, Sundar identifies singing, listening, and speaking as key sites in which gendered notions of identity and difference take form. Charting new paths through seven decades of film, media, and cultural history, Sundar identifies key shifts in women’s playback voices and the Islamicate genre of the qawwali. She also conceptualizes spoken language as sound, and turns up the volume on a capacious, multilingual politics of belonging that scholarly and popular accounts of nation typically render silent. All in all, Listening with a Feminist Ear offers a critical sonic sensibility that reinvigorates debates about the gendering of voice and body in cinema, and the role of sound and media in conjuring community.

Key changes have emerged in Bollywood in the new millennium. Twenty-First Century Bollywood traces the emerging shifts in both the content and form of Bollywood cinema and examines these new tendencies in relation to the changing dynamics of Indian culture. The book historically situates these emerging trends in relation to previous norms, and develops new, innovative paradigms for conceptualizing Bollywood in the twenty-first century. The particular shifts in contemporary Bollywood cinema that the book examines include the changing nature of the song and dance sequence, the evolving representations of male and female sexuality, and the increasing presence of whiteness as a dominant trope in Bollywood cinema. It also focuses on the increasing presence of Bollywood in higher education courses in the West, as well as how Bollywood’s growing presence in such academic contexts illuminates the changing ways in which this cinema is consumed by Western audiences. Shifting the focus back on the cinematic elements of contemporary films themselves, the book analyses Bollywood films by considering the film dynamics on their own terms, and related to their narrative and aesthetic usage, rather than through an analysis of large-scale industrial practices. It will be of interest to students and scholars of South Asian Studies, Film Studies, and Cultural Studies.

Uncovers the queer nature of heterosexuality on film.