A postman struggles to deliver the last letter on his last day of work. A prostitute elopes with the auto rickshaw driver who arranged clients for her. An inspector discovers the dead body of the boy he had an altercation with the previous evening. In seven riveting stories, Ari Gautier peels back the layers of human emotions until glimpses of greed, anger and lust can finally reveal themselves. Unsettling and irresistible, Nocturne Pondicherry is an all too realistic collection where mundane situations - featuring common people, ill-fated street dwellers and hapless immigrants - pull readers in and fling them into the abyss.
“The drops of rain make a hole in the stone, not by violence, but by oft falling.” – Lucretius We’re excited to present the July 2024 edition of Storizen Magazine, themed "Feel the Fresh... Droplets." This issue delves into the exhilarating spirit of renewal and transformation, exploring how fresh starts can spark significant changes in our lives and communities. This month, we're honored to feature the esteemed journalist and author Bhaskar Roy on our cover, in collaboration with Jaico Publishing House for the second time! His latest work, "Fifty Year Road," intertwines personal memoir with Indian history, vividly portraying post-war challenges, the Naxalbari uprising, and the Emergency. Dive into this special feature to experience the rich emotional landscape of our nation's past. For the first time ever, we're showcasing reviews of over 60 books—our largest collection yet! We hope these reviews inspire your reading list and help you discover your next great read. A heartfelt thank you to our readers for your ongoing support and enthusiasm. Your engagement fuels Storizen Magazine’s journey. We invite you to immerse yourself in these fresh narratives, share them with your network, and consider subscribing to our digital edition to stay connected with our latest updates. Thank you for being an essential part of our community. Here’s to embracing every moment’s freshness and the stories that unfold. Storizen Magazine July 2024 is OUT NOW!
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1973.
Seeking to escape captivity, Lakshmi the temple elephant sets out on a stirring journey toward freedom. On her way, she briefly experiences life as a film star and encounters a colorful cast including a three-legged dog named Tripod Dog Baba, other elephants in the Bandipur Forest, a chameleon facing an existential crisis, a moon who dances with an elephant, and a flying fish called Alphonse. Lakshmi’s Secret Diary is a remarkable Indian Francophone novel set in Pondicherry, the former capital of French India. Blending philosophical meditations, retellings of Sanskrit mythology, and social critique, Ari Gautier tells the story of Lakshmi’s attempt to escape her fate. From the point of view of animals, the novel explores concepts of destiny, freedom, and identity. It illuminates the paradoxes of animal-human relations in India, where animals are both abused and worshiped, and provides an imaginative critique of the caste system. Gautier’s vivid portrait of Pondicherry brings to life the religious, cultural, culinary, and visual diversity of the city’s districts and sheds light on the little-known history of French colonialism in India. An afterword explores issues such as reincarnation and Indian translation traditions in relation to the novel. At once tragic and comic, satirical and surreal, Lakshmi’s Secret Diary is a surprising, compelling, and moving novel from a gifted storyteller.
If there was anything our neighbours envied us, it was our thinnais. The working-class district of Kurusukuppam is not the Pondicherry of tourist brochures. Here, residents are a bewildering mix of Creoles, colonial war veterans, proud communists and French citizens who have never left India's shores. It is a place of everyday tragedies, melodramatic occurrences and stubborn, absurd hope. But life in Kurusukuppam is upturned by the arrival of a curious tramp, Gilbert Thaata, a wizened Frenchman who has clearly seen hard times. Settling down on the narrator's verandah, his thinnai, Gilbert Thaata begins to earn his keep by recounting the tale of the rise and fall of his family's fortunes as the custodians of a mysterious diamond, the Stone of Sita. The fanciful story that unfolds is one that stretches across centuries and encompasses the history of France's colonial legacy in India. As entranced as they are by the raconteur, his listeners cannot help but ask - just who is this old man and how did he fall on such misfortune? Masterfully translated from the French original by Blake Smith, Ari Gautier's The Thinnai offers a panoramic view of Pondicherry's past, the whimsical eccentricities of its present and shines a light on the quirks of history that come to define us.
The compelling story of the great Irish pioneers who left their homeland and in the process profoundly influenced their adoptive countries. From the first voyages of Saint Brendan in the early sixth century, an estimated 10 million people have left the Irish shores for other countries, and today, more than 80 million people worldwide claim Irish descent. In the centuries after the fall of Rome, Irish missionaries carried the word of the Christian God throughout Europe, while soldiers and mariners from across the land ventured overseas in all directions. The advent of the British Empire ignited a slow but extraordinary exodus from Ireland. These "Wild Geese" who opted to live outside of the Protestant state took their chances in the Spanish and French empires, as well as in the fledgling New World. These immigrants played an important role wherever they went: rising to high political and military positions in France and Spain, impacting the foundation of the United States, and fighting in the Civil War that followed it nearly eighty years later. Other Irish would come to the fore in business, science, engineering, and the arts, while some were destined for infamy as mobsters and gunslingers. Historian Turtle Bunbury explores the lives of these men and women, great and otherwise, whose pioneering journeys beyond the Irish shore have played a profound role in world history and have left their indelible mark far beyond Ireland. Throughout The Irish Diaspora, Bunbury takes these overlooked events and characters and weaves them into an entertaining, and often surprising, history of the Irish abroad.
