Edited by Balamohan Shingade and Erena Shingade (GLORIA Books)
Past the Tower, Under the Tree offers a portrait of twelve artists and activists crafting a life in community. From street theatre to rap, from the tattoo hut to the meditation hall, each contributor offers a window into unexpected contexts and rich forms of practice. In these contributions that span love letters to tributes to appeals, we’re invited to reimagine what it means to learn, and to recover a promise in that process: the possibility of a fuller education, where craft and companionship go together.
Poems by Richard von Stumer
Slender Volumes locates the cypress trees of Buddhist folklore in Onehunga and the teachings of the Zen tradition along its foreshore. Elaborating on kōans collected by poet-philosopher Eihei Dōgen, each poem fastens centuries and distances together to find insight in everyday things: seagulls on a handrail, insects drinking from a pan of water, sump oil glistening in a white bucket.
Tote bag
Limited Edition of 100
Our limited edition tote bag features Two Buffaloes and the Moon, an illustration by Balamohan Shingade in response to Richard von Sturmer’s poem “Nanquan’s ‘Water Buffalo.’”
“When asked where he will go after his last breath, Nanquan replies that he will become a water buffalo at the foot of a mountain. I nod in agreement, my head heavy but well-balanced with two large horns...” (16).
Philippa Emery, “Part One” (2024), edition of 10
Stock: 5 remaining
Philippa Emery, “Part Three” (2024), edition of 10
Philippa Emery, “Part Six” (2024), edition of 10
INDIAIndependent, curious, and radical publishing
The Greatest Indian Stories Ever Told:
Fifty Masterpieces from the Nineteenth Century to the Present
EDITED BY ARUNAVA SINHA
PUBLISHED BY ALEPH BOOK COMPANY, 2023
$ 55.00 NZD
A selection of some of the finest literary short fiction written by Indian writers since the genre came into being in the country in the late nineteenth century.
A selection of some of the finest literary short fiction written by Indian writers since the genre came into being in the country in the late nineteenth century.
Selected and edited by Mitra Phukan
Selected and translated by Arunava Sinha
Selected and edited by Rita Kothari
Selected and translated by Poonam Saxena
Selected and translated by Neerja Mattoo
The Greatest Malayalam Stories Ever Told
Selected and translated by A. J. Thomas
Selected and translated by A. J. Thomas
The Greatest Marathi Stories Ever Told
Selected and edited by Ashutosh Potdar
Selected and edited by Ashutosh Potdar
Selected and translated by Leelawati Mohapatra, Paul St-Pierre and K. K. Mohapatra
Selected and edited by Renuka Singh and Balbir Madhopuri
Selected and edited by Sujatha Vijayaraghavan and Mini Krishnan
Selected and translated by Dasu Krishnamoorty and Tamraparni Dasu
The Greatest Urdu Stories Ever Told
Selected and translated by Muhammad Umar Memon
Selected and translated by Muhammad Umar Memon
Women’s writing forms a vibrant part of Manipuri literature. Crafting the Word captures a region steeped in conservative patriarchy and armed conflict, and also a place where women’s activism has been at the forefront of peace-making.
Tags: anthology, Northeast India, Zubaan Books
Stories abound in Assam’s fields, ponds, rivers, forests, hills and cities. Most of its people wear each other’s clothes, eat each other’s food, speak each other’s languages. Women and transpeople bring stories of multiple experiences from Assam to the world.
Tags: anthology, Northeast India, Zubaan Books
An old Mizo proverb holds that a woman’s wisdom takes her only as far as the village stream. And yet, when the editors sought writings by women, they were delighted to find a wealth of stories, narratives, personal accounts, poems, art and more.
Tags: anthology, Northeast India, Zubaan Books
A grandmother’s tattoos, the advent of Christianity, stories woven into fabrics, a tradition of orality, the imposition of a “new” language, a history of war and conflict: All this and much more informs the writers and artists in this book.
Tags: anthology, Northeast India, Zubaan Books
Many of these works capture the quiet unease of civil unrest—in homes and kitchens, in marketplaces and taxis. Yet this anthology is also a celebration of wisdom and joy, of queerness and sisterhood, of mothers and feminine bodies, of home and hearths.
Tags: anthology, Northeast India, Zubaan Books
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Premchand, translated from Hindi by Pranav Kumar Singh, illustrated by Vandana Singh
Edited by Pallavi Aiyar
Translated and introduced by Ralph Russell (Speaking Tiger Books)
Kavery Nambisan (Aleph)
Translated and introduced by Wendy Doniger (Speaking Tiger Books)
A Brahman “mega convention” in contemporary Pune reasserts faith in endogamy for “national interest”, and imposes new codes on Brahman women. A Brahman Congress leader suggests that a Dalit chief minister be raped and paid compensation. In his 1916 paper “Castes in India”, the 25-year-old Ambedkar offered the insight that the caste system thrives by its control of women, and that caste is a product of sustained endogamy. Since then, till the time he piloted the Hindu Code Bill, seeking to radicalise women’s rights in the 1950s, Ambedkar deployed a range of arguments to make his case against Brahmanism and its twin, patriarchy.
While Ambedkar’s original insights have been neglected by sociologists, political theorists and even feminists, they have been kept alive, celebrated and memorialised by Dalit musical troupes and booklets in Maharashtra. Sharmila Rege, in this compelling selection of Ambedkar’s writings on the theme of Brahmanical patriarchy, illuminates for us his unprecedented sociological observations. Rege demonstrates how and why Ambedkar laid the base for what was, properly speaking, a feminist take on caste.
Sharmila Rege (1954–2013) was a sociologist who headed the Krantijyoti Savitribai Phule Women’s Studies Centre, University of Pune.
Tags: non-fiction, caste, Ambedkar, Dalit, Navayana Publishing
In the mid-nineties, Birjees Dawar Ali returns to Pakistan to seek out a history left unfinished long ago, a history from which, nursing heartbreak and betrayal, she had once earlier fled, back to her home in partitioned India. Will she find the family that so generously gave her succour, the home that became her own, the people who gave her unquestioning love? Or, will all these certainties have fled with the march of history? A deeply moving narrative of love and loss, All Passion Spent focuses on the unresolved question of the 1947 Partition of India and the emergence of India and Pakistan as two separate countries.
Zaheda Hina’s richly layered narrative brought alive in this lyrical and poetic translation by Neelam Hussain, touches on the many unanswered questions that surround this painful history: the profound sense of grief and displacement, the lives sundered midstream, the lost friendships and the quest for new roots and lands under different skies.
Tags: fiction, novella, translations, India, Pakistan, Zubaan Books
This book is an attempt at intimacy with B. R. Ambedkar in his hours away from history and headlines. The aim here is to recover the ephemera that attended Ambedkar’s life and died with him—his pleasure in his library and book-collecting, his vein of gruff humour, the sensation of seeing him in the flesh for the first time, or of stepping out of a summer storm into his house and hearing him at practice on his violin. Here, we have his attendants, admirers and companions speak of Ambedkar’s love of the sherwani, kurta, lungi, dhoti, and even his sudden paean to elasticated underpants. We meet Ambedkar the lover of dogs and outsize fountain pens, proponent of sex education and contraception, anti-prohibitionist teetotaler and occasional cook.
The fragments that make up this volume enable the recovery of his many facets—a rewarding biographical quest.
Tags: non-fiction, Ambedkar, Dalit, Navayana Publishing
After the success of her collection The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet, Vandana Singh returns to the short story in Ambiguity Machines. Her deep humanism interplays with her scientific background in stories that consider and celebrate this world and others, with characters who try to make sense of the people they meet, what they see, and the challenges they face. An eleventh century poet wakes to find he is an artificially intelligent companion on a starship. A woman of no account has the ability to look into the past. And in “Requiem,” a major new novella, a woman goes to Alaska to try and make sense of her aunt’s disappearance.
Examining the revolutionary potential of speculative fiction, Singh dives deep into the vast strangeness of the universe without and within to explore the ways in which we move through space and time: together, yet always apart.
Tags: fiction, speculative fiction, short stories, novella, Zubaan Books
Brinda Karat (LeftWord Books)
Sujatha Gidla (HarperCollins)
Jerry Pinto (Speaking Tiger Books)
Daya Pawar, translated by Jerry Pinto (Speaking Tiger Books)
Rejina Marandi (Adivaani)
Behold! The Word is God: Hymns of Tukaram
Tukaram, translated by Shanta Gokhale and Jerry Pinto (Speaking Tiger Books)
Tukaram, translated by Shanta Gokhale and Jerry Pinto (Speaking Tiger Books)
Bhairavi: The Runaway
Shivani, translated from Hindi by Priyanka Sarkar (Yoda Press)
Shivani, translated from Hindi by Priyanka Sarkar (Yoda Press)
Black Coffee in a Coconut Shell: Caste as Lived Experience
Edited by Perumal Murugan, translated by C. S. Lakshmi
Edited by Perumal Murugan, translated by C. S. Lakshmi
Brahma Prakash (LeftWord Books)
Building Alternatives: The Story of India’s Oldest Construction Workers’ Cooperative
T. M. Thomas Isaac and Michelle Williams (LeftWord Books)
T. M. Thomas Isaac and Michelle Williams (LeftWord Books)
Calcutta Nights
Hemendra Kumar Roy, translated by Rajat Chaudhuri (Niyogi Books)
Hemendra Kumar Roy, translated by Rajat Chaudhuri (Niyogi Books)
Caste Matters
Suraj Yengde (Penguin)
Suraj Yengde (Penguin)
Edited by Parismita Singh (Zubaan Books)
Chandrabati, translated from Bengali by Nabaneeta Dev Sen (Zubaan Books)
Chotti Munda and His Arrow
Mahasweta Devi, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Seagull Books)
Email to pre-order: spoorbooks@gmail.com
Mahasweta Devi, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Seagull Books)
Email to pre-order: spoorbooks@gmail.com
City of Incident: A Novel in Twelve Parts
Annie Zaidi (Aleph)
Annie Zaidi (Aleph)
Clone
Priya Sarukkai Chabria (Zubaan Books)
Priya Sarukkai Chabria (Zubaan Books)
Desire and Its Discontents: Queer Politics in Contemporary India
Edited by Dipika Jain and Oishik Sircar (Zubaan Books)
Edited by Dipika Jain and Oishik Sircar (Zubaan Books)
Dust on the Road
Mahasweta Devi, translated by Maitreya Ghatak (Seagull Books)
Mahasweta Devi, translated by Maitreya Ghatak (Seagull Books)
East Wind: Stories from Kalinga-Andhra
Sudhakar Unudurti (SouthSide Books)
Sudhakar Unudurti (SouthSide Books)
Ila Arab Mehta, translated by Rita Kothari (Zubaan Books)
Bhoopal, translated by P. A. Kumar (SouthSide Books)
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd (Samya Books)
Edited by Githa Hariharan, introduced by Raja Shehadeh (LeftWord Books)
Email to pre-order: spoorbooks@gmail.com
Allama Prabhu, translated by Manu V. Devadevan
Annie Zaidi
Gopinath Mohanty, translated from Odia by Bikram Das
Banu Mushtaq, translated from the Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi
SHOW MORE
Nabarun Bhattacharya, translated by Sunandini Banerjee
Achin Vanaik
Homeward: Towards a Poetics of Space
Edited by Soibam Haripriya
Edited by Soibam Haripriya
Bhanwar Meghwanshi (Navayana Publishing)
Malika Amar Shaikh, translated by Jerry Pinto (Speaking Tiger Books)
In Praise of Laziness and Other Essays
Indrajit Hazra (Yoda Press)
Indrajit Hazra (Yoda Press)
Narayan Surve, translated by Jerry Pinto (Speaking Tiger Books)
India and Communism
B. R. Ambedkar, introduced by Anand Teltumbde (LeftWord Books)
B. R. Ambedkar, introduced by Anand Teltumbde (LeftWord Books)
Devapriya Roy and Priya Kuriyan (Westland Books)
Kuzhali Manickavel (Blaft Publications)
Manjima Bhattacharjya (Zubaan Books)
Invocations and Prayers of Khwaja Abdullah Ansari of Herat
Translated by Sardar Sir Jogendra Singh and Arthur John Arberry (Speaking Tiger Books)
Translated by Sardar Sir Jogendra Singh and Arthur John Arberry (Speaking Tiger Books)
Invisible: New Zealand’s History of Excluding Kiwi-Indians
Jacqueline Leckie (Massey University Press)
Jacqueline Leckie (Massey University Press)
Gita Ramaswamy (Hyderabad Book Trust)
Prabir Purkayastha (LeftWord Books)
T. M. Thomas Isaac (LeftWord Books)
Prabir Purkayastha (LeftWord Books)
Land, Guns, Caste, Woman
Gita Ramaswamy (Navayana Publishing)
Gita Ramaswamy (Navayana Publishing)
K. Balagopal (Perspectives, Hyderabad)
Devulapalli Krishnamurthy, translated from Telugu by Gita Ramaswamy
Edited by Farah Ghuznavi (Zubaan Books)
Venkatesh Athreya and others (LeftWord Books)
Email to pre-order: spoorbooks@gmail.com
R. B. More (LeftWord Books)
Yamini Narayanan
Edited by Sonja Eismann, Maya, Ingo Schöningh
SHOW MORE
Jerry Pinto
Daribha Lyndem
Edited by Rakshanda Jalil
Anjali Deshpande
Aijaz Ahmad and Vijay Prashad (LeftWord Books)
Edited by Jaishree Misra (Zubaan Books)
Vasudha Dalmia (Three Essays Collective)
Mahasweta Devi, translated from Bengali by Radha Chakravarty (Seagull Books)
P. R. Venkatswamy (Hyderabad Book Trust)
Sumana Roy
Matampu Kunhukuttan, translated from Malayalam by Vasanthi Sankaranarayanan
Naisargi Dave
Edited by Jackie Assayag and Véronique Bénéï
Edited, annotated and introducted by G. P. Deshpande
Syed Mujtaba Ali, translated by Nazes Afroz (Speaking Tiger Books)
Devdutt Pattanaik (Zubaan Books)
Chandrasekhar Kambar, translated from Kannada by Krishna Manavalli (Speaking Tiger Books)
Edited by Jhilmil Breckenridge and Namarita Kathait (Speaking Tiger Books)
Yendluri Sudhakar, translated by K. Purushotham (SouthSide Books)
Eknath Awad, translated by Jerry Pinto (Speaking Tiger Books)
Amaru, translated from Sanksrit by Lee Siegal (Speaking Tiger Books)
Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar (Speaking Tiger Books)
Translated by Neela Bhagwat and Jerry Pinto
Salma, translated from Tamil by N. Kalyan Raman (Speaking Tiger Books)
Vijay Prashad
Jerry Pinto
Edited by Daanika Kamal
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Mir Taqi Mir, translated from Urdu by Ranjit Hoskote
Bama, translated by N. Ravi Shankar
Rahul Bhatia (Context)
Retold by Onaiza Drabu (Speaking Tiger Books)
Neha Dixit (Juggernaut)
Meena Kandasamy (Navayana Publishing)
Edited and introduced by Chaman Lal and Michael D. Yates (LeftWord Books)
Vijay Prashad (LeftWord Books)
A. G. Noorani (LeftWord Books)
Selected and translated by Nirmal Gill (Speaking Tiger Books)
Sundar Sarukkai (Seagull Books)
Edited by Bama, translated from Tamil by Ahana Lakshmi (Zubaan Books)
Devdutt Pattanaik (Aleph)
Zehra Nigah, translated by Rakhshanda Jalil
Tho Paramasivan, translated by V. Ramnarayan (Navayana Publishing)
Bhaskar Chakrabarti, translated by Arunava Sinha (Seagull Books)
Edited by Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Daniel Majchrowicz and Sunil Sharma (Zubaan Books)
K. Balagopal, curated and introduced by V. Geetha (SouthSide Books)
Gayatri Gopinath (Zubaan Books)
Romila Thapar (Seagull Books)
Vijay Prashad (LeftWord Books)
Baburao Bagul, translated by Jerry Pinto (Speaking Tiger Books)
Govind Pansare (LeftWord Books)
G. N. Saibaba (Speaking Tiger Books)
Edited by Vijay Prashad (LeftWord Books)
Usha Priyamvada, translated by Daisy Rockwell (Speaking Tiger Books)
Baba Padmanji, translated by Deepra Dandekar (Speaking Tiger Books)