About the Book FROM THE WINNER OF THE HINDU PRIZE 2018 AND THE SHAKTI BHATT PRIZE 2022 This powerful trilogy of semi-autobiographical novels begins in East Pakistan. It tells the story of little Jibon, who arrives at a refugee camp in West Bengal in the arms of his Dalit parents escaping from the Muslim-majority nation. He grows up perpetually hungry for hot rice in the camp where the treatment meted out to dispossessed families like his is deplorable. When he is barely thirteen, Jibon runs away to Calcutta because he has heard that money flies in the air in the big city. His wildly innocent imagination leads him to believe that he can go out into the world, find work and bring back food for his starving siblings and clothes for his mother whose only sari is in tatters. And once he leaves home, through the travels of this starving, bewildered but gritty boy, we witness a newly independent India as it grapples with communalism and grave disparities of all kinds.

“If you don't receive love from the ones who are meant to love you, you will never stop looking for it.” This quote by Robert Goolrick caught my attention while I was in déjà vu of unrequited love! Love is a beautiful emotion; it can even spark that hope of life in once a supposedly dead man. Unrequited love, on the other hand, can make one do what may seem impossible to him. The theme for February 2023 – Remembering Unrequited Love was slightly a painful one but it was worth it. As India Celebrated Mahashivratri on 18th February 2023, being a Lord Shiva Devotee, I have followed him wholeheartedly and will keep following him as his presence in me gives me a special energy of its own kind. Mentioning Lord Shiva, we are always in search of answers to our questions related to the history, and the existence of Gods. Fret not! You will get the answers to most of your questions by reading this book. This month, we are super excited to feature the author of Mahagatha – 100 Tales from the Puranas, Making Puranas a Bestseller, Satyarth Nayak on the cover of Storizen Magazine. Check out the exclusive feature on page 6. Reading can be a mundane task and not liked by many of us nowadays. Do you know it has the power to change your personality? Check out the article inside to know how. As we are dedicated to our love for literature, we can’t stop loving the latest books and reviewing them for our readers. We are glad to introduce a new Book Reviewer - Kiran Adharapuram who would be reviewing selected titles along with our best and favorite book reviewer – Swapna Peri. This issue comprises reviews of 16 books that will make you read even more. Check them out now. Keep showering your love and we will bring in more valuable content to enlighten you. Happy Reading!

About the Book FROM THE WINNER OF THE HINDU PRIZE 2018 AND THE SHAKTI BHATT PRIZE 2022 This powerful trilogy of semi-autobiographical novels begins in East Pakistan. It tells the story of little Jibon, who arrives at a refugee camp in West Bengal in the arms of his Dalit parents escaping from the Muslim-majority nation. He grows up perpetually hungry for hot rice in the camp where the treatment meted out to dispossessed families like his is deplorable. When he is barely thirteen, Jibon runs away to Calcutta because he has heard that money flies in the air in the big city. His wildly innocent imagination leads him to believe that he can go out into the world, find work and bring back food for his starving siblings and clothes for his mother whose only sari is in tatters. And once he leaves home, through the travels of this starving, bewildered but gritty boy, we witness a newly independent India as it grapples with communalism and grave disparities of all kinds.

Winner of The Hindu Prize 2018 (Non-fiction) Shortlisted for the 3rd JIO MAMI Word to Screen Award 2018 If you insist that you do not know me, let me explain myself … you will feel, why, yes, I do know this person. I’ve seen this man. With these words, Manoranjan Byapari points to the inescapable roles all of us play in an unequal society. Interrogating My Chandal Life: An Autobiography of a Dalit is the translation of his remarkable memoir Itibritte Chandal Jivan. It talks about his traumatic life as a child in the refugee camps of West Bengal and Dandakaranya, facing persistent want—an experience that would dominate his life. The book charts his futile flight from home to escape hunger, in search of work as a teenager around the country, only to face further exploitation. In Kolkata in the 1970s, as a young man, he got caught up in the Naxalite movement and took part in gang warfare. His world changed dramatically when he was taught the alphabet in prison at the age of 24—it drew him into a new, enticing world of books. After prison, he worked as a rickshaw-wallah and one day the writer Mahasweta Devi happened to be his passenger. It was she who led him to his first publication. Today, as Sipra Mukherjee points out, ‘issues of poverty, hunger and violence have exploded the cautiously sewn boundaries of the more affluent world’, rendering archaic the comfortable distances between them. Despite ‘Chandal’ explicitly referring to a Dalit caste, this narrative weaves in and out of the margins.

Spanning half a life, My Father's Garden tells the story of a young doctor--the unnamed narrator--as he negotiates love and sexuality, his need for companionship, and the burdens of memory and familial expectation. The opening section, 'Lover', finds him studying medicine in Jamshedpur. At college, he discovers an all-consuming passion for Samir, a junior, who possesses his body, mind and heart. Yet, on their last morning together, when he asks Samir to kiss him goodbye, his lover tells him, 'A kiss is only for someone special.' In 'Friend', the young doctor, escaping heartbreak, finds relief in Pakur where he strikes up an unusual friendship with Bada Babu, the head clerk of the hospital where he is posted. In Bada Babu's house, they indulge a shared love for drink, delicious food and convivial company. But when government bulldozers arrive to tear down the neighbourhood, and Bada Babu's house, the young doctor uncovers a sordid tale of apathy and exploitation--and a side to his new friend that leaves him disillusioned. And in 'Father', unable, ultimately, to flee the pain, the young doctor takes refuge in his parents' home in Ghatsila. As he heals, he reflects on his father--once a vital man who had phenomenal success at work and in Adivasi politics, then an equally precipitous downfall--and wonders if his obsessive gardening has anything to do with the choices his son has made. Written with deep empathy and searing emotional intensity, and in the clear, unaffected prose that is the hallmark of Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar's style, My Father's Garden marks a major talent of Indian fiction writing at the top of his form.

About the Book SHORTLISTED FOR THE JCB PRIZE, THE DSC PRIZE, THE CROSSWORD BOOK AWARD IN 2019 AND THE MATHRUBHUMI BOOK OF THE YEAR PRIZE IN 2020 It’s the early seventies. The Naxalbari Movement is gathering strength in Bengal. Young men and women have left their homes, picked up arms to free land from the clutches of feudal landlords and the state, and return them to oppressed landless farmers. They are being arrested en masse and thrown into high-security jails. In one such jail, five Naxals are meticulously planning a jailbreak. They must free themselves if the revolution is to continue. But petty thief Bhagoban, much too happy to serve frequent terms for free food and shelter, has been planted by Jailor Bireshwar Mukherjee among them as a mole. Only, Bhagoban seems to be warming up to them. There’s Gunpowder in the Air is a searing investigation into what deprivation and isolation can do to human idealism. And Manoranjan Byapari is perhaps the most refreshing voice to emerge from Bengal in recent times.

Subimal Misra - anarchist, activist, anti-establishment, experimental 'anti-writer' - is a contemporary master, and among India's greatest living authors. This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar's Tale is a novella about a tea-estate worked turned Naxalite named Ramayan Chamar, who gets arrested during a worker's strike and is beaten up and killed in custody. But every time the author attempts to write that story, reality intrudes in various forms to create a picture of a nation and society that is broken down, and where systemic inequalities are perpetuated by the middle- and upper-classes who are either indifferent or actively malignant. When Colour Is A Warning Sign goes even further in its experimentation, abandoning the barest pretence of narrative and composed entirely as a collage of vignettes, dialogue, reportage, autobiography, etc.Together these two anti-novels are a direct assault on the 'vast conspiracy of not seeing' that makes us look away from the realities of our sociopolitical order. In V. Ramaswamy's translation, they make for difficult, challenging but ultimately immensely powerful reading.