The Ministry of Utmost Happiness Parody

Author: Darundhoti Roy
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781544709116
Category : India
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
I came to know that most of my fan's brains got fried after reading my novels 'The God of Dirty Things: Bicker Prize Winner 2017', 'Things That Can and Cannot be Screwed', 'Broken Banana', 'The Hanging Of Faizal Guru', 'The Shape of The Breast', etc. My fans are no longer able to live with religious Hindus peacefully. They are getting offended at anything remotely related to Hindu religion. This is hampering my fan's physical and mental health. Unfortunately it is neither possible to avoid 80 crore Hindus, nor can we deport them to Andaman Islands. Hence I wrote this novel to help my fans get 'reverse brainwash'. After reading this book, my fans may start treating Hindus as human beings. I would also like to apologize to all my fans for my past misdeeds. Jai Hind.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Author: Arundhati Roy
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1524733164
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 452

Book Description
New York Times Best Seller Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize Named a Best Book of 2017 by NPR, Amazon, Kirkus, The Washington Post, Newsday, and the Hudson Group A dazzling, richly moving new novel by the internationally celebrated author of The God of Small Things The Ministry of Utmost Happiness takes us on an intimate journey of many years across the Indian subcontinent—from the cramped neighborhoods of Old Delhi and the roads of the new city to the mountains and valleys of Kashmir and beyond, where war is peace and peace is war. It is an aching love story and a decisive remonstration, a story told in a whisper, in a shout, through unsentimental tears and sometimes with a bitter laugh. Each of its characters is indelibly, tenderly rendered. Its heroes are people who have been broken by the world they live in and then rescued, patched together by acts of love—and by hope. The tale begins with Anjum—who used to be Aftab—unrolling a threadbare Persian carpet in a city graveyard she calls home. We encounter the odd, unforgettable Tilo and the men who loved her—including Musa, sweetheart and ex-sweetheart, lover and ex-lover; their fates are as entwined as their arms used to be and always will be. We meet Tilo’s landlord, a former suitor, now an intelligence officer posted to Kabul. And then we meet the two Miss Jebeens: the first a child born in Srinagar and buried in its overcrowded Martyrs’ Graveyard; the second found at midnight, abandoned on a concrete sidewalk in the heart of New Delhi. As this ravishing, deeply humane novel braids these lives together, it reinvents what a novel can do and can be. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness demonstrates on every page the miracle of Arundhati Roy’s storytelling gifts.

Escape, Escapism, Escapology

Author: John Limon
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501391089
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Book Description
Escape, Escapism, Escapology: American Novels of the Early Twenty-First Century identifies and explores what has emerged as perhaps the central theme of 21st-century American fiction: the desire to escape-from the commodified present, from directionless history, from moral death-at a time of inescapable globalization. The driving question is how to find an alternative to the world within the world, at a time when utopian and messianic ideals have lost their power to compel belief. John Limon traces the American answer to that question in the writings of some of the most important authors of the last two decades-Chabon, Diaz, Foer, Eggers, Donoghue, Groff, Ward, Saunders, and Whitehead, among others-and finds that it always involves the faux utopian freedom and pseudo-messianic salvation of childhood. When contemporary novelists feature actual historical escape, pervasively from slavery or Nazism, it appears in their novels as escape envy or escape nostalgia-as if globalization like slavery or Nazism could be escaped in a direction, from this place to another. Thus the closing of the world frontier inspires a mirror messianism and utopianism that in US novels can only be rendered as a performative, momentary, chiasmic relationship between precocious kids and their ludic guardians.

Allegories of Neoliberalism

Author: Sarker Hasan Al Zayed
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000914119
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 103

Book Description
Simultaneously a critique of Foucauldian governmentalist interpretations of neoliberalism and a historical materialist reading of contemporary South Asian fictions, Allegories of Neoliberalism is a probing analysis of literary representations of capitalism’s “forms of appearance.” This book offers critical discussions on the important works of Akhtaruzzaman Elias, Amitav Ghosh, Aravind Adiga, Arundhati Roy, H. M. Naqvi, Mohsin Hamid, Nasreen Jahan, Samrat Upadhyay, and other writers from South Asia and South Asian diaspora. It also advances a re-reading of Karl Marx’s Capital through the themes and tropes of literature—one that looks into literary representations of commoditization, monetization, class exploitation, uneven spatial relationship, financialization, and ecological devastation through the lens of the German revolutionary’s critique of capitalism.

Words in Collision

Author: Michael L. Ross
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0228017777
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 133

Book Description
For centuries, English-language writers have borrowed words and phrases from other languages in their fictional works. Words in Collision explores this tradition of language-mixing and its consequences. Returning to Shakespeare’s Henry V, Michael Ross asks why writers employ “foreign” phrases in their English-language texts, why this practice continues, and what it means. He finds that the insertion of “foreign elements,” rather than random or arbitrary, occurs in literary works that display a self-conscious preoccupation with language in general as a dynamic determinant of social relations. Discussing nineteenth-century works by Sir Walter Scott, Charlotte Brontë, and Henry James, the book demonstrates how multilingualism connects with themes of cosmopolitanism, estrangement, and resistance to social convention. In the second half of the book, the multilingual practices of canonical Anglo-American literature are compared with postcolonial texts by Caribbean, Nigerian, and Indian authors, including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Arundhati Roy, whose choice of language is fraught with complex moral and artistic implications. Ross’s readings reveal both crucial departures and surprising underlying continuities in linguistic traditions often thought to be deeply divided in time, space, and politics. The first extended treatment of language-mixing in English texts, Words in Collision is critical to understanding past practices and future prospects for multilingualism in fiction.

Modern Indian Literature as Cosmopolis

Author: Didier Coste
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040130410
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Book Description
This book redefines modern Indian literature from a cosmopolitan comparative perspective inclusive of literature in English from India and the diaspora, in native languages, and works by non-Indians. It shows how, since the mid-19th century, Indian literary modernity pursued the conjunction of the sensuous and ethical/spiritual that characterized its three traditions (Sanskritik, Persian, and folk culture) while the encounter, both receptive and oppositional, with “the West” vastly expanded the Indian literary sphere. Aesthetics and ethics are not antithetical in the Indian cultural space, but the quest for an exclusive Indian identity versus universalist approaches offsets concerns for social justice as well as enjoyable embodied communication. The literary constellation, in many languages, now formed in and around India can be better apprehended as a virtual Cosmopolis, a commonwealth of elaborate emotions. The versatile figure of Hanuman metaphorically flies across this Ocean of Stories to make us discover new worlds of experience.

One of Ours

Author: Willa Cather
Publisher: e-artnow
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Book Description
Claude Wheeler is a young man who was born after the American frontier has vanished. The son of a successful farmer and an intensely pious mother, Wheeler is guaranteed a comfortable livelihood. Nevertheless, Wheeler views himself as a victim of his father's success and his own inexplicable malaise.Thus, devoid of parental and spousal love, Wheeler finds a new purpose to his life in France, a faraway country that only existed for him in maps before the First World War. Will Wheeler ever succeed in his new goal? The novel is inspired from real-life events and also won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923.

An Atlas of Impossible Longing

Author: Anuradha Roy
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451609205
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Book Description
“This is why we read fiction at all” raves the Washington Post: Family life meets historical romance in this critically acclaimed, “gorgeous, sweeping novel” (Ms Magazine) about two people who find each other when abandoned by everyone else, marking the signal American debut of an award-winning writer who richly deserves her international acclaim. On the outskirts of a small town in Bengal, a family lives in solitude in their vast new house. Here, lives intertwine and unravel. A widower struggles with his love for an unmarried cousin. Bakul, a motherless daughter, runs wild with Mukunda, an orphan of unknown caste adopted by the family. Confined in a room at the top of the house, a matriarch goes slowly mad; her husband searches for its cause as he shapes and reshapes his garden. As Mukunda and Bakul grow, their intense closeness matures into something else, and Mukunda is banished to Calcutta. He prospers in the turbulent years after Partition, but his thoughts stay with his home, with Bakul, with all that he has lost—and he knows that he must return.

I Love Jesus, But I Want to Die

Author: Sarah J. Robinson
Publisher: WaterBrook
ISBN: 0593193539
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
A compassionate, shame-free guide for your darkest days “A one-of-a-kind book . . . to read for yourself or give to a struggling friend or loved one without the fear that depression and suicidal thoughts will be minimized, medicalized or over-spiritualized.”—Kay Warren, cofounder of Saddleback Church What happens when loving Jesus doesn’t cure you of depression, anxiety, or suicidal thoughts? You might be crushed by shame over your mental illness, only to be told by well-meaning Christians to “choose joy” and “pray more.” So you beg God to take away the pain, but nothing eases the ache inside. As darkness lingers and color drains from your world, you’re left wondering if God has abandoned you. You just want a way out. But there’s hope. In I Love Jesus, But I Want to Die, Sarah J. Robinson offers a healthy, practical, and shame-free guide for Christians struggling with mental illness. With unflinching honesty, Sarah shares her story of battling depression and fighting to stay alive despite toxic theology that made her afraid to seek help outside the church. Pairing her own story with scriptural insights, mental health research, and simple practices, Sarah helps you reconnect with the God who is present in our deepest anguish and discover that you are worth everything it takes to get better. Beautifully written and full of hard-won wisdom, I Love Jesus, But I Want to Die offers a path toward a rich, hope-filled life in Christ, even when healing doesn’t look like what you expect.

Nineteen eighty-four

Author: George Orwell
Publisher: DigiCat
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Book Description
This is a dystopian social science fiction novel and morality tale. The novel is set in the year 1984, a fictional future in which most of the world has been destroyed by unending war, constant government monitoring, historical revisionism, and propaganda. The totalitarian superstate Oceania, ruled by the Party and known as Airstrip One, now includes Great Britain as a province. The Party uses the Thought Police to repress individuality and critical thought. Big Brother, the tyrannical ruler of Oceania, enjoys a strong personality cult that was created by the party's overzealous brainwashing methods. Winston Smith, the main character, is a hard-working and skilled member of the Ministry of Truth's Outer Party who secretly despises the Party and harbors rebellious fantasies.