Books

‘A splendid book … thoroughly fun and riveting’ S. Hussain Zaidi, bestselling author of R.A.W. Hitman Ten financial scandals that gave the world a run for its money – from ancient times to the twenty-first century. Crime stories have fascinated audiences all over the world for centuries. But as times have evolved, the spotlight on financial wrongdoing has further intensified. In Fraudster Tales: History’s Greatest Financial Criminals and Their Catastrophic Crimes, seasoned finance professional turned true crime writer Vijay Narayan Govind presents ten cases that have transformed the course of Indian and global economics. From Hegestratos, the Greek trickster from 300 BCE, to Haridas Mundhra, the first notable scam artist in independent India, readers are transported to the murky world of white-collar crimes. Along the way, we meet the criminally astute Natwarlal, whose infamous cons have become legendary, Charles Ponzi, a name that is now synonymous with get-rich-quick schemes, and witness Singaporean gambler Chia Teck Leng’s shocking banking frauds in the twenty-first century. Skilfully weaving together history, intrigue and morality, Fraudster Tales takes us on a thrilling journey through financial deceit, where the line between right and wrong is blurred and the consequences of greed are catastrophic.

The word that is often associated with stories about disability: inspiring. This is especially true of social media and online media, with posts of people with disabilities being ‘inspiring’ by doing everyday things, and articles that emphasise what they have achieved, despite their disability. But do people actually know the reality of being a person with a disability or a chronic illness, sometimes both, and their experiences and struggles? The Grammar of My Body attempts to transcend the ‘inspirational’ narrative by telling everyday stories of living with disability and chronic illness. Through essays that focus on first-person narration and authenticity, it provides readers a glimpse into the life of a disabled and chronically ill person. While each disabled and ill body has unique embodied experiences, there are common threads that cut across disabilities, and the first-hand expression of these experiences is front and centre in The Grammar of My Body. In language that is conversational and informal, but also truthful and unflinching, Anicca’s wry and personal writing compels the reader to become at once distant from, and proximate to his experiences. This book has raw and deeply personal essays about navigating life with disability and illness; everyday struggles of the body and mind; as well as lesser-known questions of care, help, dignity, dating, and love. Anicca addresses intersections that have largely remained unspoken in Indian society, such as masculinity and fatness and on growing up having developed a disability in smalltown India. What ties all of these essays together is neither disability nor illness, but the idea of vulnerability. The universal experience of vulnerabilities—may they be of not having control over our bodies or minds, or our everyday lives, dreams, and aspirations—is a powerful way of building a more empathetic world. Although these essays are focused on the author, the mirror often turns away, giving us a reflection of societal behaviour that underlines an individual’s experience of living with disability and illness.

*Winner of the 2023 PEN Translation Award*  An eerie, alienating, yet comic and profoundly sympathetic short story collection about Americans in America by one of Indonesia’s most prominent writers, now in an English translation for its fortieth anniversary, with a foreword by Intan Paramaditha. In these seven stories of People from Bloomington, our peculiar narrators find themselves in the most peculiar of circumstances and encounter the most peculiar of people. Set in Bloomington, Indiana, where the author lived as a graduate student in the 1970s, this is far from the idyllic portrait of small-town America. Rather, sectioned into apartment units and rented rooms, and gridded by long empty streets and distances traversable only by car, it’s a place where the solitary can all too easily remain solitary; where people can at once be obsessively curious about others, yet fail to form genuine connections with anyone. The characters feel their loneliness acutely and yet deliberately estrange others. Budi Darma paints a realist world portrayed through an absurdist frame, morbid and funny at the same time. For decades, Budi Darma has influenced and inspired many writers, artists, filmmakers, and readers in Indonesia, yet his stories transcend time and place. With People from Bloomington, Budi Darma draws us to a universality recognized by readers around the world—the cruelty of life and the difficulties that people face in relating to one another while negotiating their own identities. The stories are not about “strangeness” in the sense of culture, race, and nationality. Instead, they are a statement about how everyone, regardless of nationality or race, is strange, and subject to the same tortures, suspicions, yearnings, and peculiarities of the mind. Praise  “First published in Indonesia 40 years ago, this story collection from celebrated author Darma gets a second life—and an English translation—as a Penguin Classic. Across seven stories set in the gridded streets and rented rooms of Bloomington, Ind., Darma’s characters navigate their morbidly funny lives in this meditation on alienation, failed connection, and the universal strangeness of the human mind.” —The Millions

In this richly unnerving tale about family secrets and expectations, two sisters are at lifelong odds with each other, their mother, and themselves―and as every hour becomes more twisted than the last, they are all pushed to their breaking point.