Reading New India: Post-Millennial Indian Fiction in English

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Reading New India is an insightful exploration of contemporary Indian writing in English. Exploring the work of such writers as Aravind Adiga (author of the Man-Booker Prize winning White Tiger), Usha K.R. and Taseer, the book looks at how the 'new' India has been recreated and defined in an English Language literature that is now reaching a global audience. The book describes how Indian fiction has moved beyond notions of 'postcolonial' writing to reflect an increasingly confident and diverse cultures.

Reading New India covers such topics as:
- Representation of the city: Mumbai and Bangalore
- Chick Lit to Crick Lit - Call centre dramas and corporate lives
- Crime novels and Bharati narratives
- Graphic novels

Including a chronological time-line of major social, cultural and political reforms, biographies of the major authors covered, further reading and a glossary of Hindi terms, this book is an essential guide for students of contemporary world literature and postcolonial writing.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Varughese's book is exciting because it reveals to readers the latest developments in Indian fiction in English. Some of the revolutionary trends in the Indian novel that began in the 1980s with Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things and Amitav Ghosh's historical fiction have given way in postmillennial India to a wide variety of pop culture genres such as chick lit, crick lit, call-center lit, fantasy, science fiction, graphic novels, and crime writing. These "modes of artistic expression" are "engaged with representing" a fast-changing economy rising to global prominence. Varughese's review of books written in these genres and her commentary about the new India that the characters negotiate and live in are insightful. The borders between classes and nations become more porous within the spaces the characters inhabit, sexuality becomes looser but more complicated, lines between myth and reality become blurred, and the resulting ironies are unexpected. This book brings readers up to date on current literary phenomena in India, but it calls for an overall spoiler alert: the close readings, which are more like summaries, reveal everything. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. P. Venkateswaran Nassau Community College