For a long time - too long - the mirror that India held to its face was made elsewhere. 'What writer about the country would you recommend I read?' first-time travellers to India would ask, and in the late twentieth century the answer was still Forster or Naipaul or even the long-dead Kipling. In fiction, that changed with Rushdie. Now it has changed in all kinds of non-fiction. Narrative history, reportage, memoir, biography, the travel account: all have their gifted exponents in a country perfecting its own frank gaze. In this special issue, Aman Sethi's 'Love Jihad' gives us insight into the riots, religious fractiousness, mob mentality and political manipulations that have come to define day-to-day life in Uttar Pradesh; Samanth Subramanian investigates the legacy of postcolonialism among Mumbai's elite at one of the city's oldest exclusive clubs; Raghu Karnad reveals the secret and terrible history of a great Delhi monument; Amitava Kumar brings us with him into a richly detailed world of grief at his mother's funeral pyre on the banks of the Ganges; and Sam Miller follows Gandhi's footsteps through Victorian London. Photographer Gauri Gill and artist Rajesh Vangad take a fresh look at an Indian village and embellish its present with its past, and Katherine Boo introduces the photographs that helped her write Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Hari Kunzru imagines an Indian future where inequality is taken to an all-too-imaginable extreme; the 'English Summer' of 1985 is brought to life in an excerpt from Amit Chaudhuri's Odysseus Abroad; and Anjali Joseph invites us into the mind of an ageing cobbler as he splices together the loose strands of his memories. Granta 130: India features more fiction by Upamanyu Chatterjee, Deepti Kapoor, Kalpana Narayanan, Vivek Shanbhag, Neel Mukherjee; a story by one of India's finest - and unduly neglected - prose writers, Arun Kolatkar; and poetry by Tishani Doshi, Anjum Hasan, Vinod Kumar Shukla and Karthika Nar.

"A ... debut about two young brothers and their physically and psychologically abusive father"--

In the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, nearly two million citizens in Turkey and Greece were expelled from homelands. The Lausanne treaty resulted in the deportation of Orthodox Christians from Turkey to Greece and of Muslims from Greece to Turkey. The transfer was hailed as a solution to the problem of minorities who could not coexist. Both governments saw the exchange as a chance to create societies of a single culture. The opinions and feelings of those uprooted from their native soil were never solicited. In an evocative book, Bruce Clark draws on new archival research in Turkey and Greece as well as interviews with surviving participants to examine this unprecedented exercise in ethnic engineering. He examines how the exchange was negotiated and how people on both sides came to terms with new lands and identities. Politically, the population exchange achieved its planners' goals, but the enormous human suffering left shattered legacies. It colored relations between Turkey and Greece, and has been invoked as a solution by advocates of ethnic separation from the Balkans to South Asia to the Middle East. This thoughtful book is a timely reminder of the effects of grand policy on ordinary people and of the difficulties for modern nations in contested regions where people still identify strongly with their ethnic or religious community.

A "brilliant, innovative, beautiful" (The Guardian) book from the acclaimed author of Chilean Poet "Dazzling . . . a work of parody, but also of poetry." —The New York Times Book Review NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR, THE GUARDIAN, AND THE IRISH TIMES “Latin America’s new literary star” (The New Yorker), Alejandro Zambra is celebrated around the world for his strikingly original, slyly funny, daringly unconventional fiction. Now, at the height of his powers, Zambra returns with his most audaciously brilliant book yet. Written in the form of a standardized test, Multiple Choice invites the reader to respond to virtuoso language exercises and short narrative passages through multiple-choice questions that are thought-provoking, usually unanswerable, and often absurd. It offers a new kind of reading experience, one in which the reader participates directly in the creation of meaning, and the nature of storytelling itself is called into question. At once funny, poignant, and political, Multiple Choice is about love and family, authoritarianism and its legacies, and the conviction that, rather than learning to think for ourselves, we are trained to obey and repeat. Serious in its literary ambition and playful in its execution, it confirms Alejandro Zambra as one of the most important writers working in any language. NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE SUMMER BY THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, ELLE, THE HUFFINGTON POST, THE MILLIONS, VOX, LIT HUB, THE BBC, THE GUARDIAN AND PUREWOW

FROM HAN KANG, WINNER OF THE 2024 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE “[Han Kang writes in] intense poetic prose that . . . exposes the fragility of human life.”—from the Nobel Prize citation SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE • A “formally daring, emotionally devastating, and deeply political” (The New York Times Book Review) exploration of personal grief through the prism of the color white, from the internationally bestselling author of The Vegetarian “Stunningly beautiful writing . . . delicate and gorgeous . . . one of the smartest reflections on what it means to remember those we’ve lost.”—NPR While on a writer’s residency, a nameless narrator focuses on the color white to creatively channel her inner pain. Through lyrical, interconnected stories, she grapples with the tragedy that has haunted her family, attempting to make sense of her older sister’s death using the color white. From trying to imagine her mother’s first time producing breast milk to watching the snow fall and meditating on the impermanence of life, she weaves a poignant, heartfelt story of the omnipresence of grief and the ways we perceive the world around us. In captivating, starkly beautiful language, The White Book offers a multilayered exploration of color and its absence, of the tenacity and fragility of the human spirit, and of our attempts to graft new life from the ashes of destruction.

The Granta Book of India brings together, for the first time, evocative, personal and informative pieces from previous editions of Granta magazine on the experiences of Indian life, culture and politics, including extracts from the highly successful Granta 57: India! The Golden Jubilee. Included are: Suketu Mehta on Mumbai; Chitra Banerji's 'What Bengali Widows Cannot Eat'; Mark Tully on his childhood in Calcutta; Ian Jack's 'Unsteady People' - on unexpected parallels between Bihar and Britain; Urvashi Butalia on tracing her long-lost uncle; a poem by Salman Rushdie about the fatwa; Ramachandra Guha's 'What We Think of America'; Nirad Chaudhuri writing on his 100th birthday; Rory Stewart among the dervishes of Pakistan; Pankaj Mishra on the making of jihadis in Pakistan; as well as fiction by R. K. Narayan, Amit Chaudhuri and Nell Freudenberger.

When Julia flies in to war-scarred Sierra Leone from London, she is apprehensive about seeing her Uncle Moses for the first time in twenty years. But nothing could have prepared her for her encounter with her eight-year-old cousin, Citizen, a former child soldier, and for the shocking truth of what he has done. Driven by a desire to understand Citizen, Julia takes the disturbed child into the 'bush'. There they meet other child soldiers, and a story-teller, Bemba G., who provides a safe haven for them all and strives to return them to childhood through play, love, story-telling and performance. As Julia gradually rediscovers Africa, the different generations of her family rediscover their bonds. And then Bemba G. directs the child soldiers in a version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, with powerful effect.

Plunge straight in and try out philosophy for real in just ten minutes a day. This book may not turn you into a great philosopher in thirty days, but it will show you how to begin to think philosophically. Dominique Janicaud's shows that philosophy doesn't have to be intimidating. It can even be fun. He invites the reader to consider some of the big questions of philosophy and develop the critical, inquiring attitude which characterizes good philosophy. With a chapter a day, this is philosophy at its most accessible. Each short chapter tackles a single question such as - What is a human being? What does freewill mean? Is philosophy simply a matter of reading the famous works of the past. Do we need religion? What are good and evil? Along the way, we are introduced to some of the greatest thinkers of the past, from Plato to Nietzsche.

Thinkers such as Aristotle, Plato and Parmenides have shaped the way we see the world, and it is their original conception of philosophy which has placed topics such as logic, metaphysics, ethics and ontology at the heart of philosophical debates for centuries. Miriam Leonard not only explores the central theories of their works, but also gives some sense of the process of abstraction, which sees written texts transformed into timeless ideals. She looks at how simple phrases such as 'In what way?' or 'There is ...' are turned into the language of philosophy. Taking passages from Heraclitus, Parmenides, Lucretius and Cicero, as well as Plato and Aristotle, she investigates the breadth and diversity of Greek and Roman thought and provides an account of the influence of its texts on the later history of ideas.

America’s most inspirational voices, in their own words: “If you’re looking for a reason to act and dream again, you’ll find it in the pages of this book” (Chicago Tribune). Published when Studs Terkel was ninety-one years old, this astonishing oral history tackles one of the famed journalist’s most elusive subjects: Hope. Where does it come from? What are its essential qualities? How do we sustain it in the darkest of times? An alternative, more personal chronicle of the “American century,” Hope Dies Last is a testament to the indefatigable spirit that Studs has always embodied, and an inheritance for those who, by taking a stand, are making concrete the dreams of today. A former death row inmate who served nearly twenty years for a crime he did not commit discusses his never-ending fight for justice. Tom Hayden, author of The Port Huron Statement, contemplates the legacy of 1960s student activism. Liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith reflects on the enduring problem of corporate malfeasance. From a doctor who teaches his young students compassion to the retired brigadier general who flew the Enola Gay over Hiroshima, these interviews tell us much about the power of the American dream and the force of individuals who advocate for a better world. With grace and warmth, Terkel’s subjects express their secret hopes and dreams. Taken together, this collection of interviews tells an inspiring story of optimism and persistence, told in voices that resonate with the eloquence of conviction. “The value of Hope Dies Last lies not in what it teaches readers about its narrow subject, but in the fascinating stories it reveals, and the insight it allows into the vast range of human experience.” —The A.V. Club “Very Terkelesque—by now the man requires an adjective of his own.” —Margaret Atwood, The New York Times Review of Books “An American treasure.” —Cornel West