New titles from Prism

Prism Books has recently released three new titles. Why Onions Cry is a delightful collection of traditional, authentic Iyengar (south-Indian) recipes guaranteed to impress with its easy-to-follow instructions and award-winning illustrations. This book is a winner of the ‘Best in the World’ award in its category for 2011 (World Gourmand Cookbook Awards 2012, Paris, France) and selected by Gourmand as the ‘Best Vegetarian Cookbook from India’ for 2011).

While, U R Ananthamurthy’s Rujuvathu (which in a broad philosophical sense means ‘evidence / proof’) is a collection of essays by an eminent creative writer, who, as a fine thinker, places before his cultural community his views on individual creativity, tradition, language, politics and social issues, unequivocally foregrounding all the contradictions, dualities and paradoxes embedded in them. The essays are essentially deep reflections on culture and society that come from a ‘witness’ who was an engaged and involved participant in the major issues of his times.

Another interesting book of short stories from UR Ananthamurthy is Hunt Bangle Chameleon. UR Ananthamurthy, as one of the major literary figures from the Third World, is profoundly important, for his fiction challenges the stereotypes that standard literary criticism/theory (post-colonial theory in particular) has been disseminating, very specifically in the academic world, for several decades now. It is essential to situate Ananthamurthy in the post-colonial context and read his fiction as representative of the finest dimensions of Third World creativity that defies simplistic and reductionist classifications as far as non-Western cultural realities are concerned. The ten stories in this anthology cover nearly six decades of his imaginative explorations and, more significantly, bring one face to face with the remarkable range of his creativity. The stories also bring the reader to confront the major issues that India, as a nation, a society and a culture, has dealt with during these decades. In addition, the stories create spaces for new theoretical questions to be raised that have the potential to alter many of our established ideas of literature and society.