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Expecting readers' attention span to shrink further, publishers are tossing short fiction into tasty salads with catchy titles and trendy themes. HarperCollins will unveil The Japanese Wife by Kunal Basu -- the first collection of stories by the author of The Opium Clerk and The Miniaturist. The book and the film based on it -- by Aparna Sen -- will release in January.
Random House (India) editor-in-chief Chiki Sarkar vouches: "Jhumpa Lahiri's brilliant new short story collection, Unaccustomed Earth, to my mind, is the best she has written yet." The book is set to hit the stands in July. "For AIDS Sutra, we sent out about 15 writers to cover one human story related to AIDS in India -- from trans-genders to truckers, housewives who have picked up the disease from their husbands to drug injected teenagers," she added.
Authors included in the anthology are Salman Rushdie, Kiran Desai, Amit Chaudhuri, Shobhaa De, and CS Lakshmi, as well as younger writers like Sonia Falerio, Siddharth Deb and Nikita Lalwani.
Non-fiction
The non-fiction bouquet from Picador includes The Ballad Of Abu Ghraib by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris, about the notorious prison camp in Iraq. Waiting in the wings are also The Blackberry: From Cult Object To Cultural Revolution by Rod McQueen and a biography of celebrated author VS Naipaul, The World Is What It Is: VS Naipaul, The Authorised Biography by Patrick French.
Rupa's Sugar In Milk by Bakhtiar K Dadabhoy is a collection of twelve in-depth profiles of some of the greatest Parsis in India while Nandan Nilekani makes motherland his muse in Imagining India (Penguin).
Hot off Sage's press are Hirnamay Karlekar's Stray Dogs And Savage Humans: A Study of Aggression and Steve Derne's Globalisation On The Ground: New Media And The Transformation Of Culture, Class And Gender In India. Anita Nair will soon bid us Goodnight, God Bless, rounding off this list with essays on life and literature via Penguin.
Poetry
Indian poets can pause here for a musical laugh as publishers wade through verse like never before.
Jeet Thayil, whose anthology, 60 Indian Poets,will be published by Penguin India in April, sees "India establishing a genuine tradition in poetry publishing, despite the usual protestations to the contrary". Penguin will also publish Eunice de Souza's collected poems and Tranquebar, two books, Thayil's These Errors Are Correct and Daljit Nagra's Look We Have Coming to Dover!
Thayil says: "It's a good time for poetry publishing in India going by the number of interesting titles that will appear next year."
Pictorial picks
Bikash D Niyogi, managing director of Niyogi Books, believes pictorial biographies will do well in the market. While Niyogi has The Immortal Dialogue Of Mother India by Nasreen Munni Kabir and books on Nirad C Chaudhuri and Zohra Sehgal in the green room, Raghu Rai will paint his Reflections In Colour (Penguin) next year.
Roli will hawk Agra by Lucy Peck, Tamil Nadu by Latha Ananthraman (with photos by V Muthuraman) and Royal Rajasthan by Kishore Singh.
Spirituality
While last year's Gandhigiri rush has dwindled to The Coming Of Gandhi by Mushirul Hasan (Niyogi) and The Hindu Communal Project: RSS, School Education And The Murder Of Mahatma Gandhi by Mridula Mukherjee and Sucheta Mahajan (Sage), spiritualism does see a surge.
There are The Geometry Of God (fiction, Rupa) by Uzma Aslam Khan and Heaven On Earth by Pepita Seth (pictorial, Niyogi), a detailed account of Kerala's Guruvayur Temple.
Random House catalogues Foreskin's Lament by Shalom Auslander, "about god, believing, orthodoxy, faith, family, community and rebellion" -- against Sage's Strong Religion And Zealous Media: Christian Fundamentalism And Communication In India by Pradip Ninan Thomas.
Filmmaker Saeed Mirza's missive, Ammi: Letter To A Democratic Mother (Tranquebar) is an "exploration of the way Islam is viewed today". Says Roy, "We'll be launching the Chicken Soup for the Indian Soul series early next year. These are inspirational stories from ordinary people and celebrities, specifically geared for the Indian reader."
Politics
Former president APJ Abdul Kalam will play a double role with a book on him and by him, courtesy HarperCollins. While The Family And The Nation by Kalam and Acharya Mahapragya emphasises the primary importance of family as the basic social unit, Five Years With Kalam by his secretary PM Nair is "an inside account of the most popular presidency India has ever known".
Also from HarperCollins is Amazing Democracy by TS Krishnamurthy, former Chief Election Commissioner, observing "the workings of the Indian democracy at close quarters in every conceivable situation and permutation".
Conflict And Diplomacy (Rupa) by Jaswant Singh and SP Bhatia delineates how East Pakistan became Bangladesh.
New kids on the block
The White Tiger (HarperCollins) is a first novel by Time correspondent Aravind Adiga, described as "an ironic take on the new India with its techno-brilliance and IT prowess". The Zoya Factor by Anuja Chauhan, another novel from the house of HarperCollins, has cricket for a context.
According to Sarkar, "Two debuts I am really excited about are Basharat Peer and A Case Of Exploding Mangoes. One is a young journalist's scorching book on Kashmir. Part memoir, part reportage, it tells the human stories behind the last 20 years of violence in the region. The other is a black, utterly gripping novel about the last days of General Zia written by BBC Urdu bureau head Mohammed Hanif."
