Indian Classics

A spellbinding story collection from Booker Prize finalist Ruth Ozeki, about the lives we almost lived, the people we can’t quite forget, and the stories that shape us long after the last page is turned In this spirited and emotionally resonant collection, award-winning novelist Ruth Ozeki...

Charles Alexander Eastman (1858-1939) was a Santee Dakota physician, writer, national lecturer, and reformer. Indian Boyhood (1902) is a recollection of Eastman's earliest childhood memories up to the age of 15. He describes the traditional ways in which the tribe governed itself - a police force, hunting and warrior scouts, and the tribal council. The book includes family and tribal legends of adventure, bravery, and nature that he heard in the lodge of the tribe historian.

The essential Khushwant Singh collection. In an essay in this anthology, Khushwant Singh claims that he is not a nice man to know. Whatever the truth of that assertion, there is little question about his skill as a witty, eloquent and entertaining writer. This book collects the best of over...

When a billionaire hotelier and political operator attempts to pit his three daughters against one another, a brutal struggle for primacy begins in this modern-day take on Shakespeare’s King Lear. Set in contemporary India, where rich men are gods while farmers starve and water is fast running...

While the Puranas mention that Lord Brahma becomes an avatar whenever Lord Vishnu comes to Earth to establish dharma, it is in the Dasam Granth (one of the holy books of the Sikhs) that the avatars are actually listed. The common point in Hinduism and Sikhism regarding the avatars of Brahma is...

The translator Shaida does something altogether breathtaking in the expansive and lovely poems found in Khusro, the Indian Orpheus: A Hundred Odes, a collection of 100 translated poems by Khusro, an Indian musician, scholar, and poet of Persian descent. Fans of Rumi, the translations of Coleman Barks in particular, and Persian poets in general will delight in this current and timeless effort.

Nikhil is a passive landowner. His houseguest is Sandip, a headstrong anti-imperialist. Between them is Nikhil’s wife, Bimala, dutiful to her conventional husband yet drawn to the fiery independence and bold flirtations of the charismatic Sandip. As Bimala questions her role as a woman and the possibilities for her life outside marriage, the three undergo an emotional struggle that will change their lives forever—just as their country undergoes a radical upheaval of its own.

Much about Nalanda remains shrouded in mystery. When was it founded? Who founded it? Who studied and taught there? What subjects were offered? How many students and teachers were there? Was Nalanda a university in the modern sense? And what ultimately led to its downfall? Nalanda by Abhay K...

Famous novelist Rhys Carter loved to take long walks through his beech tree forest. It was relaxing, and the walks helped him think through the writer's block that oft times visited him while working on a novel. Today though, was different. This time he had been following the smell and sight of a stream of smoke coming from his woods. What had brought him here today was the need to find the source of the smoke. Where it led him was to something he had never seen before.

‘Ram’s story as a metaphor for human strengths and weaknesses and as a window to inner divinity’—Tehelka / Ram is maryada purushottam, the supreme upholder of social values, scion of the Raghu clan, jewel of the solar dynasty, seventh avatar of Vishnu. Reviled by feminists, appropriated...

Chickpeas to Cook is the story of the woman of the tribe, women from some of the smallest of communities, often no more than a few hundred families in Singapore. How do these women live, think, breathe? What does the Dawoodi Bohra woman answer, for instance, when she’s asked if her daughter...

A Brazilian masterpiece, now in English for the first time: a playfully profound chronicle of an urban sophisticate’s misadventures in the Amazon A Penguin Classic “My life’s done a somersault,” wrote Mário de Andrade in a letter, on the verge of taking a leap. After years of dreaming...

While it lived, the tamarind tree stood at the crossroads of a small village in Southern India. For more than fifty years it was a benevolent observer, offering shade without discrimination. It bore witness to laughter and tears, to tragedy and simple pleasures, and to the history of the village itself as it transformed from the old ways of bullock-led carts to a bustling community of social, political, economic, and ecological change.

'Pyre glows with as much power as [One Part Woman] did, and adds immeasurable value to contemporary Indian literature'-The Hindu Saroja and Kumaresan are in love. After a hasty wedding, they arrive in Kumaresan's village, harboring a dangerous secret: their marriage is an inter-caste one, likely...

A haunting new novel by the author of Vengeance in which a chance encounter between a blocked painter and a journalist leads to a complicated romance that reveals their buried histories and vulnerabilities against the backdrops of an America in chaos and Mexico. Beginning in the first summer of...

A gripping narrative of one of the great survival stories of American history: the opening of the first permanent English settlement in the New World. Drawing on period letters and chronicles, and on the papers of the Virginia Company–which financed the settlement of Jamestown–David Price...

"Since time immemorial, India has been an ocean bed over which numerous stories have flowed and enriched the world. Storytellers from Tulsidas to Rohinton Mistry have added their magic to this magnificent repository. Inspired in part by Somadeva’s Kathasaritasagara, William Radice collects...

"Since time immemorial, India has been an ocean bed over which numerous stories have flowed and enriched the world. Storytellers from Tulsidas to Rohinton Mistry have added their magic to this magnificent repository. Inspired in part by Somadeva’s Kathasaritasagara, William Radice collects...

As Michael maneuvers through his working-class neighborhood delivering groceries, he enters the homes and lives of his customers. He’s confronted by the school yard and street corner violence of local thugs. With the 1967 Arab-Israeli War fresh in public memory, he passes for Greek or Italian...

When his father dies, Prince Jauna Khan succeeds to the throne of Delhi as Muhammad bin Tughlaq. His reign will prove to be epic and bloody, but unsurpassed in splendour, innovation and defeat. A formidable strategist and remarkable scholar, the Sultan will go down in history for his brutality...