Folktales from India Penguin Premium Classic Edition

Folktales from India Penguin Premium Classic Edition
Author: A.K. Ramanujan
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Total Pages: 567
Release: 2023-03-20
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 935492977X

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.

The Indian Epics Retold Penguin Premium Classic Edition

The Indian Epics Retold Penguin Premium Classic Edition
Author: R. K. Narayan
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Total Pages: 576
Release: 2023-03-20
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9354929540

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.

Manto: Selected Stories Penguin Premium Classic Edition

Manto: Selected Stories Penguin Premium Classic Edition
Author: Sadat Hasan Manto
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2023-03-20
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 935492963X

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 Penguin Book of Modern Indian Short Stories

The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Short Stories
Author: Stephen Alter
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2001-10-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9351183335

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.

The Penguin Book of Classical Indian Love Stories and Lyrics

The Penguin Book of Classical Indian Love Stories and Lyrics
Author: Ruskin Bond
Publisher: Penguin Books India
Total Pages: 268
Release: 1996
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9780140258875

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.

American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings

American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings
Author: Zitkala-Sa
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2003-02-25
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9780142437094

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.

Selected Short Stories

Selected Short Stories
Author: Rabindranath Tagore
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 472
Release: 2005-09-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0141962208

Poet, novelist, painter and musician, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) is the grand master of Bengali culture. Written during the 1890s, the stories in this selection brilliantly recreate vivid images of Bengali life and landscapes in their depiction of peasantry and gentry, casteism, corrupt officialdom and dehumanizing poverty. Yet Tagore is first and foremost India's supreme Romantic poet, and in these stories he can be seen reaching beyond mere documentary realism towards his own profoundly original vision.

The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories

The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories
Author: Jhumpa Lahiri
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 528
Release: 2019-03-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0141985623

'Rich. . . eclectic. . . a feast' Telegraph This landmark collection brings together forty writers that reflect over a hundred years of Italy's vibrant and diverse short story tradition, from the birth of the modern nation to the end of the twentieth century. Poets, journalists, visual artists, musicians, editors, critics, teachers, scientists, politicians, translators: the writers that inhabit these pages represent a dynamic cross section of Italian society, their powerful voices resonating through regional landscapes, private passions and dramatic political events. This wide-ranging selection curated by Jhumpa Lahiri includes well known authors such as Italo Calvino, Elsa Morante and Luigi Pirandello alongside many captivating new discoveries. More than a third of the stories featured in this volume have been translated into English for the first time, several of them by Lahiri herself.

The Shadow Lines Penguin Premium Classic Edition

The Shadow Lines Penguin Premium Classic Edition
Author: Amitava Ghosh
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2023-03-20
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9354929753

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.

Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov

Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov
Author:
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 498
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0141392541

'She turned into a frog, into a lizard, into all kinds of other reptiles and then into a spindle' In these tales, young women go on long and difficult quests, wicked stepmothers turn children into geese and tsars ask dangerous riddles, with help or hindrance from magical dolls, cannibal witches, talking skulls, stolen wives, and brothers disguised as wise birds. Half the tales here are true oral tales, collected by folklorists during the last two centuries, while the others are reworkings of oral tales by four great Russian writers: Alexander Pushkin, Nadezhda Teffi, Pavel Bazhov and Andrey Platonov. In his introduction to these new translations, Robert Chandler writes about the primitive magic inherent in these tales and the taboos around them, while in the afterword, Sibelan Forrester discusses the witch Baba Yaga. This edition also includes an appendix, bibliography and notes. Translated by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler With Sibelan Forrester, Anna Gunin and Olga Meerson