Fiction by Neera Kashyap: ‘The next week he, Paltu, joined the moulis. To gather honey, to pay off debts, to induce his mother to eat two meals again, to oil her hair, to soap her body, to close the door to their hut. For his father had gone, and would never return.’

Poetry by Gopi Kottoor: ‘And then, the sip / From the spoon / That’ll soon become memory, / That slowly drawn inward kiss’

Indian urban centres are getting hotter every year due to the heat island effect. With millions of lives at stake, urgent city-planning measures are needed across the country to mitigate the incoming crisis. By Vipin Labroo

Told through the prism of a Shakesperean comedy of errors and mistaken identities, Kiran Rao’s Laapata Ladies (2024) explores the various paths to female self-determination in rural India. By Karan Madhok

Poems by Sayan Aich Bhowmik: ‘I have been told the entire cosmos of our being / Hair, skin, Tissues / Renew themselves. / The old ones dissolving in air, without pain / Much like ice melting on the kitchen shelf.’

Sanket Mhatre poems in A City Full of Sirens address and interrogate the relations between ‘the eternal’ and ‘the transient’ in a nuanced manner, tearing into the expansive multiplicities of singular moments. By Ankush Banerjee

Fiction by Anannya Nath: ‘Prosenjit forgets to react. What would he do now? How should he talk her through this? Is this what happens once you forget about being a father?’

Published in India’s 75th year of Independence, Converse: Contemporary English Poetry by Indians (2022) presents unique and diverse voices from the diaspora, with poems that are a sustained discussion with history, oneself, the environment, myth, science, and relationships. By Dustin Pickering

Poems by Shreya Sharma: ‘‘i will make for you one and a hundred popsicles in each flavour you can think of. pink bubblegum big collective miracle evening and so on.’

Poems by Shome Dasgupta: ‘take me back / to the moss and crawfish, please / Krishna—take me back to moonlit / moss and claws red like tandoori / curry, soft and savory.’

In The Solitude of a Shadow, Devibharathi presents a complex picture of a vengeance-seeking narrator fractured by trauma, caste, and identity crisis. By Sneha Pathak

Amitava Kumar’s The Yellow Book: A Traveller's Diary (2023), conceptualizes the journal itself as an art object, where the act of journaling becomes a form of artistic practice. By Pranavi Sharma