One Women Island
Twenty thousand years ago, when early man made his way to North America, a tribe of prehistoric predators made the great trek as well. But these giant, deadly beasts seemingly became extinct…and humans lived to become the most violent creatures on Earth. Man’s brutal nature reached a boiling-point with the execution of Russia’s last czar and his entire family. But some believed that the czar’s children, Alexei and Anastasia, survived―and came to America with the treasury of the Romanov dynasty. That legend was born on July 17, 1918―and lives on to this day…
कामाल चौधुरी की कविताएं
कामाल चौधरी ने गुरुदेव रबींद्रनाथ टैगोर और महाकवि नज़रुल से प्रेम किया है और बंगलादेश के मुक्ति-संग्राम के आल्हाद और अवसाद को जिया है। उनकी कविताओं का कथ्य और शिल्प हमारे देश के नई कविता आंदोलन जैसा लगता है, लेकिन उनमें आत्मनिर्वासन, अकेलापन, अजनबीपन, घुटन, कुंठा, निराशा, संत्रास, सड़न, बदबू जैसी क्षणजीवी नकारात्मक आधुनिक भावबोध की प्रवृत्तियां नहीं हैं। वे सकारात्मक आधुनिक भावबोध के कवि हैं। उनका सौंदर्यबोध ज़मीन पर सीधे खड़े रहकर क्षितिज देखता है और मानता है कि इंसान कभी अकेला नहीं होता। अजनबी नहीं होता। उसके जीवन में सड़न, घुटन, निराशा नहीं होती। बशर्ते हम इतिहास में बहाए गए ख़ून से सनी लाइनों के ख़तों को पढ़ना सीख लें। वे मानते हैं कि समाज, संसार, लड़ाइयां और राष्ट्रसंघ द्वारा पोषित हथियारों के गोदाम हमारे बाजू में राहत की पट्टी नहीं, नफ़रत के घाव बांधते हैं। ज़िंदगी एक टुकड़ा लकड़ी के क्रैच पर घिसटती है, इसलिए वे बार-बार अपनी स्वयं की महत्ता पहचानने का आह्वान करते हैं और बताते हैं कि मेहनती पसीने की खुशबू हमारी मृगनाभि सुगंध है। पसीने की खुशबू से ज़्यादा बेहतर खुशबू संसार में नहीं है। उनकी कविता अवसादग्रस्त मानव का संबल बनती है। इंसानियत के सशक्तिकरण के लिए वे अपनी कविता से ‘चंद बेख़ौफ़ मज़दूर’ लेने का प्रस्ताव रखते हैं। सलाह देते हैं कि ‘गाने गाओ नजरुल के, एक बार गाने गा कर तो देखो।‘कुल मिलाकर प्रगतिशील काव्यांदोलन और बांग्ला साहित्य की विकसित चेतना की सुदृढ़ परंपरा के साथ वे अपनी कविताओं में आज के समाज को दलदली अंधेरे से निकालने की कोशिश करते हैं। खरा बोलने के अपने ख़तरे हैं, फिर भी बोलना तो होगा ही, वे कहते हैं ‘अगर मैं बोलूं तो हड्डियों में होता है शहंशाही दर्द।‘ अब ये शहंशाही दर्द क्या है, इसे अगर आप जानना चाहते हैं तो इन कविताओं से गुज़रिए, पढ़िए, क्योंकि अगर आप इनसे रूबरू नहीं हुए तो ये बीच में से उठकर किसी रिफ्यूजी गली में घर ढूंढने के लिए नींद में चली जाएंगी।
A Green Dove in Silence
This collection of select prose poems of Gauranga Mohanta is a translation from original Bangla into English. The translators have kept the form of the original intact, developed their structures, and evolved thereby a new definition of prose poem in English.
The Nomadic Trail
The poems in this collection capture the intensely personal negotiations of the poet with the world outside. The personal however is not a retreat into an exclusive world of exilic withdrawal but an opening up to a hospitable terrain that accommodates the social and political reflections. On the surface of the apparently insignificant and mundane shines the elusive soul of things. Out of the temporal arrangements emerge some cloves of garlic to a Botticellian world of aesthetics.
The images efficiently weld the inner and the outer lives of a variety of subjects like seeing, reading, travelling, home, loss, silence, arrivals, departures and memory among others. The collection is striking in its cosmopolitan homeliness and/or homely cosmopolitanism. The concluding prose essay ‘Along the Nomadic Trail.’ is a readerly speculation on the extra-
poetic ghosts that haunt writing and reading.
Dhanak
A book of poetry immaculately composed in the hills of Solan, Himachal. They capture music and soul very beautifully.
Thousand Eclipses
Eons before the birth of the Roman Empire, there was a civilization dedicated to the sciences of earth, sea, and sky. In the City of Light lived people who made dark plans to lay waste to their uncivilized neighbors using the very power of the planet itself. As the great science of their time was brought to bear on the invading hordes, hell was set loose on Earth. And the civilization of Atlantis disappeared in a suicidal storm of fire and water…
Earthenware
Earthenware is a playhouse of intersecting images. It celebrates a life lived in pure passion and strikes a queer relationship between natural and supernatural elements. It also adores a life lived in the illusion of reality. Amidst all the magic of living and survival, there are some poems that mythicize life’s lapses and longings. The collection brings together the dramatis personae of odd and even kinds—now as illusion, now as image, now as reality. Factual or fabled, the poems are minimalist in
form, style, and verbal expression; they are deceptively literal and seemingly shorn of the complexities of modernist style. Instead of being sixty in number, the sixty poems are indeed one as they enter each other and develop a close kinship in an
eerie manner.
Smile Dammit
Aditi Ray is the author of a children’s ebook and two romance novels. She also blogs at https://lovewordie.wordpress.com/ and writes for various Indian and international websites. This is her first non-fiction book where she recounts incidents from her own life and how she discovered happiness in simple ways.
In this book the author recounts incidents from her childhood when she faced sadness and then takes us through pages of her diary to show how she attempted to find her smiles back again by various means. She goes onto tell us how these methods can be used by anyone who is determined to regain his happiness – just as she still does. She truly believes that being happy is easy, if only one wants to be.
Music Box and Moonshine
Music Box and Moonshine is a collection of eighteen short stories from both undivided and partitioned Bengal. Translator, Partha Banerjee, takes pride in his dexterity in the two languages: he believes his long immigrant life in America preceded by a Bengali-medium schooling in Kolkata, and his profession as a human rights activist and educator working with ordinary Americans made him skillful in mastering them. The stories he chose for this collection transcend a century – from Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Rabindranath Tagore, and Bibhuti Bhushan Bandyopadhyay’s classic literature to a modernist period’s Syed Mujtaba Ali, Leela Majumdar, and Parashuram to a post-modernist Narendra Nath Mitra and Sunil Ganguly, and such literary giants. He believes a vast audience – both young and old generations willing to admire the treasures of Bengali literature – would embrace the translated gems.