Showing results by author "Jeet Thayil" in All Categories

Jeet Thayil's luminous debut novel completely subverts and challenges the literary traditions for which the Indian novel is celebrated. This is a book about drugs, sex, death, perversion, addiction, love, and god, and has more in common in its subject matter with the work of William S. Burroughs or Baudelaire than with the subcontinent's familiar literary lights. Above all, it is a fantastical portrait of a beautiful and damned generation in a nation about to sell its soul. Written in Thayil's poetic and affecting prose, Narcopolis charts the evolution of a great and broken metropolis.

Shuklaji Street, in Old Bombay: In Rashid's opium room a young woman holds a long-stemmed pipe over a flame as men sprawl and mutter in the gloom. In Shuklaji Street they say you introduce only your worst enemy to opium. But then whispers build of a new terror, something that shifts the tenuous balance of survival for the city's nameless, invisible poor. A rich, hallucinatory dream of a novel, Narcopolis captures the Bombay of the 1970s in all its compelling squalor. With a cast of pimps, pushers, poets and gangsters, it is a lyrical and unforgettable journey into a sprawling underworld.

Following the death of his wife, Dominic Ullis escapes to Bombay in search of oblivion and a dangerous new drug, Meow Meow. So begins a glorious weekend of misadventure as he tours the teeming, kaleidoscopic city from its sleek eyries of high-capital to the piss-stained streets, encountering a cast with their own stories to tell, but none of whom Ullis - his faculties ever distorted - is quite sure he can trust.

Rattapallax, described as the "visceral multimedia hit of poetry" by TimeOut magazine, features readings from leading contemporary poets and writers. Special feature on Pablo Neruda. Some notable poets in this issue are Martin Espada, Charles Bernstein, Sapphire, Breyten Breytenbach, Timothy Liu, Charles Martin, Brenda Coultas, and Fernando Paixa.

Rattapallax, described as the "visceral multimedia hit of poetry" by TimeOut magazine, features readings from leading contemporary poets and writers. Some notable poets in this issue are Anne Waldman, John Kinsella, Meena Alexander, Venus Khoury-Ghata, Marilyn Hacker, Claire Malroux, and Robin Becker.

Rattapallax, described as the "visceral multimedia hit of poetry" by TimeOut magazine, features readings from leading contemporary poets and writers. Rattapallax 12 features poetry on post-Apartheid South Africa, including works from poets such notable poets as Raul Zurita, Tomas Harris, Harolodo de Campos, and Dael Orlandersmith