The devastatingly original debut novel from a winner of the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. “Profoundly moving . . . I cannot remember when I last read something as touching as this.” —Amitav Ghosh, author of The Glass Palace First published by a small press in India, Jerry Pinto’s debut novel has already taken the literary world by storm. Suffused with compassion, humor, and hard-won wisdom, Em and the Big Hoom is a modern masterpiece, and its American publication is certain to be one of the major literary events of the season. Meet Imelda and Augustine, or—as our young narrator calls his unusual parents—Em and the Big Hoom. Most of the time, Em smokes endless beedis and sings her way through life. She is the sun around which everyone else orbits. But as enchanting and high-spirited as she can be, when Em’s bipolar disorder seizes her she becomes monstrous, sometimes with calamitous consequences for herself and others. This accomplished debut is graceful and urgent, with a one-of-a-kind voice that will stay with readers long after the last page.
Brilliantly comic and almost unbearably moving, Jerry Pinto's Em and the Big Hoom is one of the most powerful and original fiction debuts of recent years. She was always Em to us. There may have been a time when we called her something ordinary like Mummy, or Ma, but I don't remember. She was Em, and our father, sometimes, was the Big Hoom. In a tiny flat in Bombay Imelda Mendes - Em to her children - holds her family in thrall with her flamboyance, her manic affection and her cruel candour. Her husband - to whom she was once 'Buttercup' - and her two children must bear her 'microweathers', her swings from laugh-out-loud joy to dark malevolence. In Em and the Big Hoom, the son begins to unravel the story of his parents: the mother he loves and hates in the same moment and the unusual man who courted, married and protected her - as much from herself as from the world. 'It is utterly persuasive and deeply affecting: stylistically adventurous it is never self-indulgent; although suffused with pain it shows no trace of self-pity. Parts of it are extremely funny, and its pages are filled with endearing and eccentric characters' Amitav Ghosh 'Pinto chases the elusive portrait of a mother who simply said of herself that she was mad. As I read this novel, that also portrays a very tender marriage and the life of a Goan family in Bombay, it drowned me. I mean that in the best way. It plunged me into a world so vivid and capricious, that when I finished, I found something had shifted and changed within myself. This is a world of magnified and dark emotion. The anger is a primal force, the sadness wild and raw. Against this, the jokes are hilarious, reckless, free falling .... This is a rare, brilliant book, one that is wonderfully different from any other that I have read coming out of India' Kiran Desai 'A child's-eye view of madness and sorrow, full of love, pain, and, unaccountably, much wild comedy. ne of the very best books to come out of India in a long, long time' Salman Rushdie Jerry Pinto has been a mathematics tutor, school librarian and journalist and is now associated with MelJol, an NGO that works in the sphere of child rights. He has edited several anthologies including, most recently, an anthology on his native city, Mumbai.
In 2012, Jerry Pinto published his debut novel, 'Em and the Big Hoom', which drew upon his experience of living with a mother who was bipolar. It touched thousands of readers, among them many who had similar experiences-of living with someone with a mental illness or infirmity. Some of these readers shared their stories with him, and agreed to share them with the world. 'A Book of Light' collects these harrowing yet moving, even empowering, stories-about the terror and majesty of love; the bleakness and unexpected grace of life; the fragility and immense strength of the human mind.
When King Charles Ii Of England Married Princess Catherine De Braganza Of Portugal In 1661, He Received As Part Of His Dowry The Isles Of Bom Bahia, The Good Bay. Reclaimed From The Sea, These Would Become The Modern City Of Bombay. A Marriage Of Affluence And Abject Poverty, Where A Grey Concrete Jungle Is The Backdrop To A Heady Potpourri Of Ethnic, Linguistic And Religious Subcultures, Bombay, Renamed Mumbai After The Goddess Mumbadevi, Defies Definition. Bombay, Meri Jaan, Comprising Poems And Prose Pieces By Some Of The Biggest Names In Literature, In Addition To Cartoons, Photographs, A Song And A Bombay Duck Recipe, Tries To Capture The Spirit Of This Great Metropolis. Salman Rushdie, Pico Iyer, Dilip Chitre, Saadat Hasan Manto, V.S. Naipaul, Khushwant Singh And Busybee, Among Others, Write About Aspects Of The City: The High-Rise Apartments And The Slums; Camaraderie And Isolation In The Crowded Chawls; Bhelpuri On The Beach And Cricket In The Gully; The Women'S Compartment Of A Local Train; Encounter Cops Who Battle The Underworld; The Jazz Culture Of The Sixties; The Monsoon Floods; The Shiv Sena; The Cinema Halls; The Sea. Vibrant, Engaging And Provocative, This Is An Anthology As Rich And Varied As The City It Celebrates.
Now a film from Netflix India, this memorable novel confronts issues of sexuality in a changing society through a love triangle between a brother, sister, and their family’s lodger Recently adapted into a stunning Netflix film, Cobalt Blue is a tale of rapturous love and fierce heartbreak told with tenderness and unsparing clarity. Brother and sister Tanay and Anuja both fall in love with the same man, an artist lodging in their family home in Pune, in western India. He seems like the perfect tenant, ready with the rent and happy to listen to their mother’s musings on the imminent collapse of Indian culture. But he’s also a man of mystery. He has no last name. He has no family, no friends, no history, and no plans for the future. When he runs away with Anuja, he overturns the family’s lives. Translated from the Marathi by acclaimed novelist and critic Jerry Pinto, Sachin Kundalkar’s elegantly wrought and exquisitely spare novel explores the disruption of a traditional family by a free-spirited stranger in order to examine a generation in transition. Intimate, moving, sensual, and wry in its portrait of young love, Cobalt Blue is a frank and lyrical exploration of gay life in India that recalls the work of Edmund White and Alan Hollinghurst—of people living in emotional isolation, attempting to find long-term intimacy in relationships that until recently were barely conceivable to them.
As Appu pieces together his fragmented past, one man's memory becomes the landscape of an entire nation's socio-political history. A touching portrait of the reconciliation between love and guilt, this novel parallels the state of a nation with the fall of a nuclear family, offering a poignant exploration of self-discovery and hope.
Set in nineteenth-century rural Africa, Fiela's Child tells the gripping story of Fiela Komoetie and a white, three-year old child, Benjamin, whom she finds crying on her doorstep. For nine years Fiela raises Benjamin as one of her own children. But when census takers discover Benjamin, they send him to an illiterate white family of woodcutters who claim him as their son. What follows is Benjamin's search for his identity and the fundamental changes affecting the white and black families who claim him. "Everything a novel can be: convincing, thought-provoking, upsetting, unforgettable, and timeless."—Grace Ingoldby, New Statesman "Fiela's Child is a parade that broadens and humanizes our understanding of the conflicts still affecting South Africa today."—Francis Levy, New York Times Book Review "A powerful creation of time and place with dark threads of destiny and oppression and its roots in the almost Biblical soil of a storyteller's art."—Christopher Wordsworth, The Guardian "The characters in the novel live and breathe; and the landscape is so brightly painted that the trees, birds, elephants, and rivers of old South Africa are characters themselves. A book not to miss."—Kirkus Reviews
Literatures of Madness: Disability Studies and Mental Health brings together scholars working in disability studies, mad studies, feminist theory, Indigenous studies, postcolonial theory, Jewish literature, queer studies, American studies, trauma studies, and comics to create an intersectional community of scholarship in literary disability studies of mental health. The collection contains essays on canonical authors and lesser known and sometimes forgotten writers, including Sylvia Plath, Louisa May Alcott, Hannah Weiner, Mary Jane Ward, Michelle Cliff, Lee Maracle, Joanne Greenberg, Ann Bannon, Jerry Pinto, Persimmon Blackbridge, and others. The volume addresses the under-representation of madness and psychiatric disability in the field of disability studies, which traditionally focuses on physical disability, and explores the controversies and the common ground among disability studies, anti-psychiatric discourses, mad studies, graphic medicine, and health/medical humanities.
It is now over two decades since the Hindi-film heroine drove the vamp into extinction, and even longer since the silver screen was ignited by the true Bollywood version of a cabaret. Yet, Helen – nicknamed ‘H-Bomb’ at the height of her career – continues to rule the popular imagination. Improbably, for a dancer and a vamp she has become an icon. Jerry Pinto’s gloriously readable book is a study of the phenomenon that was Helen: Why did a refugee of French-Burmese parentage succeed as wildly as she did in mainstream Indian cinema? How could otherwise conservative families sit through, and even enjoy, her ‘cabarets’? What made Helen ‘the desire that you need not be embarrassed about feeling’? How did she manage the unimaginable: vamp three generations of men on screen? Equally, the book is a brilliantly witty and provocative examination of middle-class Indian morality; the politics of religion, gender and sexuality in popular culture; and the importance of the song, the item number and the wayward woman in Hindi cinema.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE WINNER • With music pulsing on every page, this startling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption “features characters about whom you come to care deeply as you watch them doing things they shouldn't, acting gloriously, infuriatingly human” (The Chicago Tribune). One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Bennie is an aging former punk rocker and record executive. Sasha is the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Here Jennifer Egan brilliantly reveals their pasts, along with the inner lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs. “Pitch perfect.... Darkly, rippingly funny.... Egan possesses a satirist’s eye and a romance novelist’s heart.” —The New York Times Book Review
