My New Book and a few old ones too

 

LIFE: 24 Essays is my latest book. All the essays in it were originally published in this same blog as part of the A-to-Z challenge hosted by Blogchatter. The essays look at life from the viewpoints of philosophy, literature, psychology and religion. Some editing has been done to the blog posts in order to make this book more coherent and systematic. The book is available absolutely free here.

I take this opportunity to thank the Blogchatter Team which takes much pain to get bloggers to produce quality writing, organise it into standard books, and make the books available at their website with due publicity. Their enthusiasm and elan vital went long way to sustain the writer in me. Last year it produced another book, Great Books for Great Thoughts, which is available here. Again absolutely free. This book introduces the reader to 26 great works of literature starting with Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man and ending with Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek.

For obvious reasons, I am not able to make all my books available in the free market. My only novel, Black Hole, which has found a decent readership, is available as an e-book at Amazon. The paperback is awaiting certain clearances from Amazon. This novel is postmodern in theme and technique and hence will require a bit of effort on the part of the reader to capture its essence. The novel tells the story of Ishan Salman Panicker, an English teacher at Kailash Public School in Delhi which is slowly brought to its ruin by a religious cult whose degradation is coeval with independent India. The novel, though rather short, covers a wide span from the death of Lala Lajpat Rai [“The Lion of Punjab refused to roar when lathis fell on him relentlessly under Scott’s exhilarated supervision”] to the conversion of India into a black hole by the Pradhan Sevak’s hallucinations.

In Black Hole, a school dies in Delhi a year after Narendra Modi assumes power in the same Delhi. The school where I taught in Delhi died in 2015 because of a religious cult. My memoirs, Autumn Shadows, ends with that death before relating my rather painful but equally farcical journey through life. The e-book is available at Amazon while the paperback is available here.

When Covid-19 hit the world like punch on its very face which was punctuated by elan and aplomb, the pain was felt in the very solar plexus of the human species. Suffering: what does it mean? How to deal with it? My book, Coping with Suffering, was written to answer those and other related questions. The book was received well and is still available at Amazon.

The pandemic inspired the creative writer in me and produced a few short stories. These and a few other stories written before the onslaught of the deadly virus were anthologised under the title, Love in the Time of Corona. This collection is available here. Absolutely free again.

Books have been my best friends all along. They are perhaps the only enduring ones too. They can sustain us when the going gets tough and tougher. We are passing through turbulent times and I hope these books may add some value to your leisure.