Folktales From India Penguin Premium Classic Edition

Folklore pervades childhoods, families and communities and is the language of the illiterate. Even in large, modern cities, folklore-proverbs, lullabies, folk medicine, folktales-is only a suburb away, a cousin or a grandmother away. Wherever people live, folklore grows. India is a country of many languages, religions, sects and cultures. It is a land of many myths and countless stories. Translated from twenty-two Indian languages, these one hundred and ten tales cover most of the regions of India and represent favorite's narratives from the subcontinent. A.K. Ramanujan's outstanding selection is an indispensable guide to the richness and vitality of India's ageless oral folklore tradition.

Saadat Hasan Manto's first collection of stories was published in the 1940s, but his stories have an enduring relevance. Now read by more people than ever before, the simple clarity of his stories about arginalized people, his astute understanding of the complexity of human nature and the poignancy of his stories on Partition transcend spatial and temporal boundaries many of his characters are legendary and his taut narratives are a great source of insight into the human condition. Widely regarded as one of the greatest short-story writers of the Subcontinent, Manto is now, a hundred years after his birth, also acknowledged as one of the most powerful voices of his time. An enigma in his lifetime, and plagued by financial troubles, alcoholism and legal persecution in the last years of his life, he draws a posthumous wave of near-universal admiration. Aatish Taseer's sensitive translation captures the lyricism and power of Manto's voice. Manto, Selected Stories, with two new stories, is a collection to be savoured by new readers and old fans of Manto alike.

The Indian Epics Retold collects three of R. K. Narayan's best narratives on Hindu tradition and culture. The Ramayana and The Mahabharata are an intrinsic part of our legacy. Narayan's Ramayan is based on the Tamil version of the verse by the poet Kamban. Narayan's love for Rama's character and his admiration for Kamban's beautiful poetry is conveyed through this work. For The Mahabharata and for Gods, Demons and Others, Narayan referred to the original Sanskrit version of Mahabharata and other puranas. The stories follow the original text as closely as possible and make for a wonderful read for the young and old.

Twenty classic short stories from master writers across the country This superb collection contains some of the best Indian short stories written in the last fifty years, both in English and in the regional languages. Some of these stories – ‘We Have Arrived in Amritsar’ by Bhisham Sahni, ‘Companions’ by Raja Rao, ‘The Sky and the Cat’ by U.R. Anantha Murthy, ‘A Devoted Son’ by Anita Desai – have been widely anthologized and are well known. Others, like Premendra Mitra’s ‘The Discovery of Telenapota’, Gangadhar Gadgil’s ‘The Dog that Ran in Circles’, Mowni’s ‘A Loss of Identity’, O.V. Vijayan’s ‘The Wart’ and Devanuru Mahadeva’s ‘Amasa’, are less familiar to readers but are nevertheless classics of the art of the short story. This new and revised edition includes three additional classics: R.K. Narayan’s ‘Another Community’, Avinash Dolas’s ‘The Victim’ and Ismat Chughtai’s ‘The Wedding Shroud’. The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Short Stories is a marvellous and entertaining introduction to the rich diversity of pleasures that the Indian short story–a form that has produced masters in over a dozen languages–can offer.

Bakha is a proud and attractive young man. Nonetheless he is an Untouchable- an outcast in India's caste system. Into this vivid recreation of a single day in the sweeper and toilet-cleaner Bakha's life, Anand pours a vitality, fire, and richness of detail that earn his place as one of the most important Indian writers of the twentieth century.

From Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling to Satyajit Ray and R. K. Narayan, this text is a collection of spine-chilling tales of the supernatural from India.

As a young boy, Amitav Ghosh's narrator travels across time through the tales of those around him, traversing through unreliable planes of memory, unmindful of physical, political and chronological borders. But as he grows older, he is haunted by a seemingly random act of violence. Bits and pieces of stories, both half-remembered and imagined, come together in his mind until he arrives at an intricate, interconnected picture of the world where borders and boundaries mean nothing, mere shadow lines that we draw dividing people and nations. Out of a complex web of memories, relationships and images, Amitav Ghosh builds an intensely vivid, funny and moving story. Exposing the idea of the nation state as an illusion, an arbitrary dissection of people, Ghosh depicts the absurd manner in which your home can suddenly become your enemy.