Shashi Deshpande's latest novel explores the lives of two women, one obsessed with music and the other a passionate believer in Communism, who break away from their families to seek fulfilment in public life. Savitribai Indorekar, born into an orthodox Hindu family, elopes with her Muslim lover and accompanist, Ghulaam Saab, to pursue a career in music. Gentle, strong-willed Leela, on the other hand, gives her life to the Party, and to working with the factory workers of Bombay. Fifty years after these events have been set in motion, Madhu, Leela's niece, travels to Bhavanipur, Savitribai's home in her last years, to write a biography of Bai. Caught in her own despair over the loss of her only son. Madhu tries to make sense of the lives of Bai and those around her, and in doing so, seeks to find a way out of her own grief.

A FINALIST FOR THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY YOUNG LIONS FICTION AWARD • SHORTLISTED FOR THE PEN/ROBERT W. BINGHAM PRIZE FOR DEBUT SHORT STORY COLLECTION • WINNER OF THE CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARDS GOLD MEDAL IN FIRST FICTION • WINNER OF THE JOHN ZACHARIS FIRST BOOK AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE STORY PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY LIBRARY JOURNAL “An urgent and necessary literary voice.”—Alexander Chee, Electric Literature “Tough, luminous stories.”—The New York Times Book Review “Spectacular.”—Vogue Xuan Juliana Wang's remarkable debut introduces us to the new and changing face of Chinese youth. From fuerdai (second-generation rich kids) to a glass-swallowing qigong grandmaster, her dazzling, formally inventive stories upend the immigrant narrative to reveal a new experience of belonging: of young people testing the limits of who they are, in a world as vast and varied as their ambitions. In stories of love, family, and friendship, here are the voices, faces and stories of a new generation never before captured between the pages in fiction. What sets them apart is Juliana Wang’s surprising imagination, able to capture the innermost thoughts of her characters with astonishing empathy, as well as the contradictions of the modern immigrant experience in a way that feels almost universal. Home Remedies is, in the words of Alexander Chee, “the arrival of an urgent and necessary literary voice we’ve been needing, waiting for maybe, without knowing.” Praise for Home Remedies “A radiant new talent.”—Lauren Groff “These dazzling stories interrogate the fractures, collisions and glorious new alloys of what it means to be a Chinese millennial.”—Adam Johnson, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Orphan Master’s Son “Home Remedies doesn’t read like a first collection; like Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, the twelve stories here announce the arrival of an exciting, electric new voice.”—Financial Times “Stylistically ambitious in a way rarely seen in prose fiction . . . Writing like this will never stop enlightening us. [Wang’s] voice comes to us from the edge of a new world.”—Los Angeles Review of Books

Turn to the natural benefits of herbs for enhanced energy, digestive health, hormonal harmony, pain relief, skin care, improved sleep, and more. Throughout history, herbs have been used medicinally to promote healing and vitality. Think chamomile for better sleep, green tea for enhanced focus, or elderberry for immunity boost. Today, herbs are more popular than ever, celebrated not just for their effectiveness but also as natural and affordable remedies. This beginner-friendly guide welcomes a new generation to the trusted tradition. Engagingly written for a wide audience, it presents richly detailed profiles of more than sixty herbs, including cultural history, uses, tips and beautiful watercolor illustrations. “The simple practicality of Nature’s Remedies by Jean Willoughby makes this book easy to consult when needed. Some of my favorite herbs were cited within its pages such as St. John’s Wort, White Tea, Dandelion, Ashwaghanda, and Elderberry just to name a few. If you are new to horticulture and botany like I am, and you want a fresh, simple, and clean start then Nature’s Remedies by Jean Willoughby is the book for you.” —Tea End

An Updated and Expanded New Edition of Backyard Medicine! Modern medicine is truly a blessing. Advances are made with astonishing speed every day, using both science and technology to make our lives longer and healthier. But if the era of modern medicine began less than two hundred years ago, how did people treat sickness and poor health before then? This book holds the answer. Researched and written by a practicing medical herbalist and natural healer, and now with even more herbs and medicinal plants, Backyard Medicine is the basis for a veritable natural pharmacy that anyone can create. Featuring more than 120 easily made herbal home remedies and fully illustrated with nearly three hundred color photographs, this book offers fascinating insights into the literary, historic, and global applications of fifty common wild plants and herbs that can be used in medicines, including: Comfrey Dandelion Honeysuckle Yarrow And so much more! Anyone who wants to improve his or her health in a completely natural way will find this book to be an absolute must-have for his or her home—and garden.

“Darkly hilarious” short stories by the acclaimed author of Lay It on My Heart (San Francisco Chronicle). Set in the Bible Belt and featuring young women whose passions and emotions are often at war with the strict demands of their religious backgrounds, these stories of friendships, families, and fundamentalists mark the debut of a remarkable new literary talent. “In these eight carefully wrought stories, set mostly in Kentucky, an exorcism is performed in the basement of a Methodist church, a teen-ager becomes convinced that she is ‘history’s second pregnant virgin,’ a divorced father returns from a trip to Jerusalem under the impression that he is a prophet, and an elderly churchwoman performs home surgeries with a bottle of Jim Beam and an ice pick. . . . Pneuman shrewdly probes the dark underside of idealized emotions like faith, frequently employing adolescent narrators to reveal adults’ hypocrisy.” —The New Yorker “Not the kind of girls you’d expect to meet in the evangelical Christian communities that Pneuman brings to life. Her girls dance and swear, drink and lie; they deflower each other with cucumbers and threaten their mothers with golf clubs. Pneuman . . . offers a clear-eyed view of the role religion plays in the lives of her characters. But her real subject is the complexity of female relationships, the ways that women depend on each other in a world where men often make themselves scarce.” —San Francisco Chronicle “The quietly desperate girls who slouch and grimace and pray through Angela Pneuman’s pitch-perfect debut story collection, Home Remedies, live in Bible Belt Kentucky and have names like Priscilla and Shiloh and Laeticia. They have mothers who suck the air out of a room and keen about love . . . best friends as benign as scorpions, and fathers who are absent or dying or crazed. With her dark sense of humor and almost eerie apprehension of what people are too clenched to say, Pneuman is a stunning new talent to watch.” —O, The Oprah Magazine “Angela Pneuman must surely be one of the most gifted young writers around.” —Lorrie Moore, New York Times–bestselling author of Birds of America

LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSLLER • WINNER OF THE NAUTILUS BOOK AWARD • “In a world full of spiritual seekers, Megan Griswold is an undisputed all-star. What a delightful journey!”—Elizabeth Gilbert, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Big Magic and Eat, Pray, Love The Book of Help traces one woman’s life-long quest for love, connection, and peace of mind. A heartbreakingly vulnerable and tragically funny memoir-in-remedies, Megan Griswold’s narrative spans four decades and six continents—from the glaciers of Patagonia and the psycho-tropics of Brazil, to academia, the Ivy League, and the study of Eastern medicine. Megan was born into a family who enthusiastically embraced the offerings of New Age California culture—at seven she asked Santa for her first mantra and by twelve she was taking weekend workshops on personal growth. But later, when her newly-wedded husband calls in the middle of the night to say he’s landed in jail, Megan must accept that her many certificates, degrees and licenses had not been the finish line she’d once imagined them to be, but instead the preliminary training for what would prove to be the wildest, most growth-insisting journey of her life.

A little girl tells how her grandmother makes special teas and warm drinks for her and her little brother when they are not feeling well.

During The Seventy Years Of Its Effective History Indian Writing In English Crossed Many Miles Stones And Has Come To Be Finally Accepted As A Major Literature Of The World. Having Won Almost Every Important Literary Prize In The Recent Few Years, Iwe Has Become Immensely Popular With The Common International Readers And Critics Alike. If Its Being Prescribed For Study In Universities Across The World Is Any Indication, The Place Of Iwe In The Canon Is Secure Forever.This Anthology Of Critical Articles Attempts To Evaluate Some Of The Major Indian Poets And Novelists And Their Influential Works From Refreshingly New Perspectives Historical, Socio-Economic, Existential, Mythological, Philosophical-Religious And Environmental.The Writers Studied Here Include Anand, Narayan, Raja Rao, Malgonkar, Bhattacharya, Joshi, Desai, Markandaya, Sahgal, Ezekiel And Ramanujan. An Interesting Addition To This Volume Are A Couple Of Articles On The Diaspora Writers Such Rohinton Mistry And The South African Indian Poets And Novelists.It Is Hoped That This Book Will Prove Itself Highly Useful To All Who Are Seriously Interested In Indian Writing In English.