Set against a backdrop of religious abuse and suffocating intolerance, Sohali Rauf’s Blasphear is a sharp commentary on the ideas of nationhood, and how its intangible forces act as blind shepherds, leading the masses down paths they cannot question. By Amritesh Mukherjee

Nishant Injam’s debut story collection The Best Possible Experience (2024) features a cast of characters between India and the United States who are often homesick for another world: a world that could be a physical or a metaphorical distance away, a world they aspire to with the burdens of a life unfulfilled. By Karan Madhok

Vinita Agrawal takes the role of a ‘poetic journalist’ in Eartha, in verses that spark with compassion for all living entities on the planet. By Tansy Troy

The dystopian universe of Varun Thomas Mathew’s The Black Dwarves of the Good Little Bay (2019) is a prophetic chronicling of crisis as a condition of existence, and the contingency of truth as a mode of knowing or bearing witness to crisis. By Paromita Patranobish

In a wide-ranging conversation with, acclaimed poet and dancer Tishani Doshi spoke to Ronald Tuhin D’Rozario about her literary work, the fundamentals of ‘Vilambit’ in her writing, and artistic journeys through space and time.

Poet, writer, and essayist Sumana Roy speaks to Ronald Tuhin D’Rozario about the creative process, shifting between poetry and prose, and the ‘joyous riyaz’ of a literary life.

Arundhati Roy’s storytelling illuminates the desires to split open the human grids that characterize our world, and fulfil her yearning for a particular kind of homeland: a gentler, stiller, less hypocritical, and less transactional place. By Saba Karim Khan

In his latest work, Salman Rushdie expertly flirts with the line between fact and fiction, declaring all living beings—including those reading his book—may be ‘characters’ in a grander historical fiction. When nothing is real, stories are the only reality. By Karan Madhok

Jerry Pinto’s The Education of Yuri (2022) is an atmospherically saturated, layered accordion, sounding an adventure in scale that simultaneously encompasses the chronicle of a young boy’s coming of age, and a time capsule of Bombay of a bygone era. By Paromita Patranobish

An essay on art and analysis by Dhani Muniz: “Art was never art in the way that food has always been food; or perhaps, rather, it is a vast restaurant at the end of the universe in which we are all picky eaters.”

Set around the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre, Navtej Sarna’s Crimson Spring is a tragic retelling that details individual lives shattered by this dark chapter in history. By Shreemayee Das

In Vauhini Vara’s debut novel, the story of the eponymous King Rao is part of larger questions of human creativity and meaning in a transhumanist world, where life is data-fied, and sentience, thought, emotion and ethics are mere products of automated and arbitrary calculations. By Paromita Patranobish