Penguin Book Of Indian Ghost Stories

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.

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.

This terrifying selection of ghost stories brings together the very best classic works from the masters of the supernatural Phantom coaches, evil familiars, shadowy houses, spectral children and mysterious doppelgangers haunt these tales. They range from the famous, such as M. R. James's tale of an ancient curse, 'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come To You, My Lad' and W. W. Jacobs's story of gruesome wish-fulfilment, 'The Monkey's Paw', to lesser-known masterpieces: Robert Louis Stevenson's 'Thrawn Janet', telling of a parish priest tormented for life by his encounter with the undead; Charles Dickens's unsettling account of a railway signal-man and an ominous portent; and Edward Bulwer Lytton's 'The Haunted and the Haunters', where a cursed house harbours a diabolical secret. Michael Newton's introduction discusses why ghost stories scare us and why they flourished from the mid-nineteenth to early-twentieth century, examining their changing conventions throughout history. This edition also includes further reading, notes, a glossary and a chronology. Edited with an introduction and notes by Michael Newton

One of NPR’s Great Reads of 2016 “A lively assemblage and smart analysis of dozens of haunting stories…absorbing…[and] intellectually intriguing.” —The New York Times Book Review From the author of The Unidentified, an intellectual feast for fans of offbeat history that takes readers on a road trip through some of the country’s most infamously haunted places—and deep into the dark side of our history. Colin Dickey is on the trail of America’s ghosts. Crammed into old houses and hotels, abandoned prisons and empty hospitals, the spirits that linger continue to capture our collective imagination, but why? His own fascination piqued by a house hunt in Los Angeles that revealed derelict foreclosures and “zombie homes,” Dickey embarks on a journey across the continental United States to decode and unpack the American history repressed in our most famous haunted places. Some have established reputations as “the most haunted mansion in America,” or “the most haunted prison”; others, like the haunted Indian burial grounds in West Virginia, evoke memories from the past our collective nation tries to forget. With boundless curiosity, Dickey conjures the dead by focusing on questions of the living—how do we, the living, deal with stories about ghosts, and how do we inhabit and move through spaces that have been deemed, for whatever reason, haunted? Paying attention not only to the true facts behind a ghost story, but also to the ways in which changes to those facts are made—and why those changes are made—Dickey paints a version of American history left out of the textbooks, one of things left undone, crimes left unsolved. Spellbinding, scary, and wickedly insightful, Ghostland discovers the past we’re most afraid to speak of aloud in the bright light of day is the same past that tends to linger in the ghost stories we whisper in the dark.

The stories in this collection capture the essence of the Indian Railways - from the small-town station, at the time of the Raj, to the present day big-city station bursting at the seams. The teening and varied life of the Indian Railway station and its environs have fascinated writers from Jules Verne in the 1870s to more recently Satyajit Ray, R.K. Laxman and more modern writers. In this anthology, one of India's best-known writers makes a selection of greattest railway stories the subcontinent has produced. Julese Verne Rudyard Kipling Flora Annie Steel Hon. J.W. Best Jim Corbett Khushwant Singh Ruskin Bond Manoj Das Intizar Husain Satyajit Ray Bill Aitkin R.K. Laxman Victor Banerjee Manojit Mitra.

A thought-provoking collection of searing prose from a Sioux woman that covers race, identity, assimilation, and perceptions of Native American culture Zitkala-Sa wrestled with the conflicting influences of American Indian and white culture throughout her life. Raised on a Sioux reservation, she was educated at boarding schools that enforced assimilation and was witness to major events in white-Indian relations in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Tapping her troubled personal history, Zitkala-Sa created stories that illuminate the tragedy and complexity of the American Indian experience. In evocative prose laced with political savvy, she forces new thinking about the perceptions, assumptions, and customs of both Sioux and white cultures and raises issues of assimilation, identity, and race relations that remain compelling today.

A compilation of love stories and poems from the classical literature and folklore of India Set in regions of great natural beauty where Kamadeva, the god of love, picks his victims with consummate ease, these stories and lyrics celebrate the myriad aspects of love. In addition to relatively well-known works like Kalidasa's Meghadutam and Prince Ilango Adigal's Shilappadikaram, the collection features lesser-known writers of ancient India like Damodaragupta (eighth century AD), whose 'Loves of Haralata and Dundarasena' is about a high-born man's doomed affair with a courtesan; Janna (twelfth century), whose Tale of the Glory-Bearer is extracted here for the story of a queen who betrays her handsome husband for a mahout, reputed to be the ugliest man in the kingdom; and the Sanskrit poets Amaru and Mayaru (seventh century), whose lyrics display an astonishing perspective on the tenderness, the fierce passion and the playful savagery of physical love. Also featured are charming stories of Hindu gods and goddesses in love, and nineteenth-century retellings of folk tales from different regions of the country like Kashmir, Punjab, Maharashtra and Rajasthan. Both passionate and sensuous in its content, this book is sure to appeal to the romantic in all of us.