The Hindu On Books newsletter: 100 Indian short stories, Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction longlist, Srikar Raghavan’s Karnataka and more

Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. The longlist of the second edition of the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction was announced last week, and it is dominated by British writers and debutants. The inaugural prize went to Naomi Klein for Dopplegangers, in which she deals with the aftermath of being mistaken for Naomi Wolf who had radically different views. Klein has been writing for years about “corporate power and its ravages”, and engaged in the climate change fight. Wolf, on the other hand, is “in an open warfare against objective reality,” at home in the world of conspiracy theories, and rising fascism. In her timely book about the contemporary world, Klein explores the mirror, alternative world that appears to have ensnared the masses. This year too, several of the longlisted books deal with power and its abuse. Anne Applebaum (Autocracy, Inc.), Helen Castor (The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV), Alexis Wright (Tracker), Rachel Clarke (The Story of a Heart), Jenni Fagan (Ootlin) are on the list, which is diverse with wideranging themes from injustice to climate change.  The chair for the 2025 Non-Fiction Prize is journalist, author and broadcaster Kavita Puri, who said the longlist showcases some of the best writing by women from around the world this year. The shortlist will be announced on March 26, and the winner on June 12, together with the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

In reviews we read Srikar Raghavan’s book on the making of modern Karnataka, 100 Indian stories, edited by A.J. Thomas, and more. We also talk to Sophie Mackintosh about her upcoming novel, a romance set in a parallel universe.

Books of the week

Srikar Raghavan’s book, Rama, Bhima, Soma (Context) is a travelogue through the social, cultural, literary, political, intellectual movements and accidents that made modern Karnataka. In this journey, all the big names — Shivaram Karanth, U.R. Ananthamurthy, Shankar Punekar, Gopalakrishna Adiga, Bhyrappa, Rajkumar, Kalburgi, Dabholkar, Hebbar, B.V. Karanth, Gopal Gowda, T.P. Kailasam, Girish Karnad – are there, and politicians and rulers. But, writes, Suresh Menon in his review, “There is ‘history from below’ and nods to the Western canon. Body builders, conmen, crooks, revolutionaries are in the cast too. In the cultural history of a region, no man is an island.” Menon says it’s a superbly researched and delicately crafted work. There are glimpses of the routes leading to contemporary India too. As Raghavan says in his book, “We are caught between a futurism trying to make sense of our cultural heritage, and a medievalism that is engaged in transplanting poorly grasped histories into political ideologies that simultaneously locate themselves in the past, present and future.”

A.J. Thomas has edited an anthology of Indian short stories from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries published by Aleph. Part of the enchantment of 100 Indian Stories, writes Geeta Doctor in her review, is the discovery of old friends: Tagore’s ‘Kabuliwala’, S.K. Pottekatt’s ‘On the Riverbank’, translated from the Malayalam by Thomas, Premendra Mitra’s ‘The Discovery of Telenapota’, translated from the Bengali by Arunava Sinha, Satyajit Ray’s ‘Two Magicians’, translated by Sinha, Vaikom Muhammad Basheer’s ‘The Blue Light’, translated by O.V. Usha and others. Thomas has organised the stories according to the age demographic of the authors — from the oldest to the more recent ones. Doctor says in the midst of all the triumphs of the human spirit, the exquisite recollections of love and fortitude, the tenderness of youth, and stray descriptions of the lushness of bird, animal and plant life, there is also much pain in the stories. “The indignities of caste and ancient rites of privilege that exist in close-knit communities are given a savage outing in the book, particularly in the stories of post-Partition India, where loyalties have also been divided. Poverty rises like a lurking spectre just waiting around the corner with hunger as its companion to ravage and tear apart the fragile links that we sometimes imagine will give us immunity.” She exhorts readers to take each story for itself and celebrate the short story.

Spotlight

The London-based Welsh writer Sophie Mackintosh writes about “big topics in a different way.” Her first book, The Water Cure, longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2018, delved into toxic masculinity, one that made women very sick. On the sidelines of the 8th Kerala Literature Festival (KLF) in Kozhikode, Mackintosh told Preeti Zachariah, “I’m interested in making abstract things literal and exploring them more that way.” Mackintosh, whose work has a mythical, otherworldly quality, is the author of two other novels, Blue Ticket (2020) (which examines a society in which whether a woman can have a baby or not is based on lottery) and the 2023 Women’s Prize-longlisted Cursed Bread, based on a true story of mass poisoning in France in 1951. Her fourth novel will be out next year. It is “very much about romantic relationships,” she said. It tells the story of a secret relationship set in a parallel universe. “It’s sad, romantic, but playful too. I had a lot of fun writing it,” she added.

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• Boforsgate: A Journalist’s Pursuit of Truth (Juggernaut) is Chitra Subramaniam’s memoir on covering the Bofors scandal. The book moves from Stockholm, Geneva, Bern and Davos to New Delhi, Bangalore and Chennai, spanning successive Indian governments, even as Subramaniam struggles with marriage, pregnancy and motherhood, even as she continued the investigation at great personal risk.

• Edward Wong, a journalist with NYT who grew up in Washington DC as the son of Chinese immigrants with family secrets, returned to Beijing and probed his father’s mysterious past. In his memoir, At the Edge of Empire (Profile Books), he tells the story of China, its past and present, through the story of his family.

• Unexpectedly (Penguin) by Maithree Wickramasinghe is a poetry collection set against the pandemic in Sri Lanka. The academic who has written widely on gender equality explores universal topics such as war and feminism as well as her privileged status as the First Lady of Sri Lanka as wife of former President Ranil Wickremesinghe.

• Vasudha Sahgal’s Almost Perfect, But Mostly Not (Rupa) is a debut short fiction that goes into the imperfections that make life real, with themes of love and loss, relationships and daily fears.