Beyond Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers is a serio-fiction based on a hundred years old true story and the fictional story of a Naxalite rebel of the seventies of last century. The true story is about a man who lived in the nineteenth century and rebelled against the restrictive life of the society at that time and used to dream about distant foreign lands and adventures, stimulated by stories from Ramayana and Mahabharata. He left home as a teenager and through many adventures in the lands unknown became a renowned soldier and officer in the Brazilian Republican Army. His sketchy biography was published in a Bengali book at the turn of the century, 1899-1900, but nothing is known about him afterwards except that he died in Brazil in 1905. Born in the same year as Rabindra Nath Thakur and two years before Swami Vivekananda he remained an icon and an enigma, the only heroic-romantic character at the dawn of Indian renaissance. The fictional Naxalite rebel of the seventies also had to leave the country after many adventurous escapes, true events in the life of many young men, and reached Brazil and came to know about his predecessor a hundred years back and started searching for him. That changed his life bringing forth many perennial issues of man and society.

This novel, SHADOWS ARE ASSASSINS is a psychological journey. The more the Novel progresses it becomes from a socio political journey of a man to the discovery of his own psychic reality. The first 42 chapters deal with our epistemological limitations as we suffer in our language, in our relations and in our day to day political aspects of life. But the next 40 chapters actually become a spiritual quest in it's own adventure of romance and love. It is violent also in the sense of mutilation of every kind of self suppressions to reach out to the reality of our desire for the Other. And the remaining 33 chapters actually become a surreal description of transcendence of every border line which human beings fear to cross. Indeed if our deeper and therefore unknown desires emerge from within and truly stand before us, it becomes exactly perceptible how a mysterious battleground of hate and love, love and death seek to destroy us and rebuild us. In the novel SHADOWS ARE ASSASSINS Shyamal Bhattacharjee, the author, makes his readers witness this perilous journey inside the mysterious battlefield human mind. Among the characters presented in the novel, some have their desired childhood and adolescence, some woman with repressed sexual desire, some woman her dead son, some man his dead father, some persons with their repressed homosexuality, some with their homicidal and suicidal tendencies. It is a dangerous shadow fight when different shadows of oneself become opponents in different lights It will not be wrong to mention that the the novel is written with a wonderful poetic language from the beginning to the end. So far it is one of the 7th unpublished novels written by Shyamal Bhattacharjee. The whole novel SHADOWS ARE ASSASSINS is framed with small chapters with a headline that captures the central idea of the next 500 to 600 words. Chapters are kept small keeping in view to its poetic and intellectual intensity. Each chapter can be regarde

The title of Beyond the Line refers to the imaginary "Line" drawn between North and South, a division established by the Peace Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559. This is an early modern time and Eurocentric construction, according to which the southern oceanic world has long been taken as symbol of expansionist philosophies and practices. An obvious motivation for changing this "Line" division is the growing influence of the "Global South" in the contemporary economic and political setting. However, another motivation for changing opinions in regard to the "Line" is equally important. We observe an emergent consciousness of the pivotal role of the oceanic world for human life. This requires the reformulation of former views and raises numerous questions. A diversity of connections comes to the mind, which demands the composition of a catalogue of case studies with an oceanic horizon. Through this operation, different problems are being linked together. Which problems encounter historians with their research on fishes in the archives? How to trace records about pirates of non-European descent in the Indian Ocean? Which role play the Oceans as mediators for labor migrations, not only of the Black Atlantic but also of people moving from Asia to Africa and vice versa? What do we know about workers on the oceans and their routes? When considering oceans as "contact zones," with which criteria can their influence in different literary texts be analyzed? Is it possible to study nationalisms taking into account these transoceanic relationships? And how do artists address these questions in their use of the media? Against the background of this catalogue of oceanic questions, "old" stories are told anew. Sometimes, their cultural stereotypes are recycled to criticize political and social situations. Or, in other cases, they are adopted for elaborating alternative options. In this sense, the contributions concentrate on countries like India, Kenya, Angola, or Brazil and cover different academic fields. A variety of objects and situations are explored, which have been and still are determinant for the construction of cultural narratives in view of the modified relationship with the geographically southern oceanic regions.

There are fictions and there are genres. Some fictions follow certain standard routes of the established genres, while on rare occasions some fictions create their own genres. That new genres might become established later or may wither away. Only future could decide their fate. But an author who treads on a new path to create a new genre is a pioneer. The spirit always deserves a salute. Such is the new novel by Aniruddha Bose “If …”. It treads along a comparatively new path. What is it? A sci-fi? A whodunit mystery thriller? Or a combination of both? The core idea is not new. Energy crisis and finding a new source of energy is a burning issue to the humankind. Fossil fuel will inevitably finish soon, it is just a matter of time. What next? Nuclear fission energy? Harnessing fusion energy? Wind energy? Tidal energy? Solar energy? Geothermal energy? Biofuel energy? These are only a few of the next possible sources of energy. And it is an established fact that big powers will go to any extent to own the newer sources of energy. In this background Aniruddha has woven the story of his novel. A completely new form of energy is almost in the hand of an Indian businessman with a strong scientific background and the source lies in the ancient Indian scripts. As usual, all the international players are in the arena with their sinister motives and men and women are murdered right and left. The rest of the story I cannot divulge here for obvious reasons.

The Essential Tagore showcases the genius of India’s Rabindranath Tagore, the first Asian Nobel Laureate and possibly the most prolific and diverse serious writer the world has ever known. Marking the 150th anniversary of Tagore’s birth, this ambitious collection—the largest single volume of his work available in English—attempts to represent his extraordinary achievements in ten genres: poetry, songs, autobiographical works, letters, travel writings, prose, novels, short stories, humorous pieces, and plays. In addition to the newest translations in the modern idiom, it includes a sampling of works originally composed in English, his translations of his own works, three poems omitted from the published version of the English Gitanjali, and examples of his artwork. Tagore’s writings are notable for their variety and innovation. His Sonar Tari signaled a distinctive turn toward the symbolic in Bengali poetry. “The Lord of Life,” from his collection Chitra, created controversy around his very personal concept of religion. Chokher Bali marked a decisive moment in the history of the Bengali novel because of the way it delved into the minds of men and women. The skits in Vyangakautuk mocked upper-class pretensions. Prose pieces such as “The Problem and the Cure” were lauded by nationalists, who also sang Tagore’s patriotic songs. Translations for this volume were contributed by Tagore specialists and writers of international stature, including Amitav Ghosh, Amit Chaudhuri, and Sunetra Gupta.

This book examines the striking resurgence of the literary letter at the end of the long twentieth century. It explores how authors returned to epistolary conventions to create dialogue across national, linguistic and cultural borders and repositions a range of contemporary and postcolonial authors never considered together before, including Monica Ali, John Berger, Amitav Ghosh, Michael Ondaatje and Alice Walker. Through a series of situated readings, the book shows how the return to epistolarity is underpinned by ideals relating to dialogue and human connection. Several of the works use letters to present non-anglophone material to the anglophone reader. Others use letters to challenge policed borders: the prison, occupied territory, the nation state. Elsewhere, letters are used to connect correspondents in different cultural and linguistic contexts. Common to all of the works considered in this book is the appeal that they make to us, as readers, and the responsibility they place on us to respond to this address. By taking the epistle as its starting point and pursuing Auerbach’s speculative ideal of weltliteratur, this book turns away from the dominant trend of ‘distant reading’ in world literature, and shows that it is in the close situated analysis of form and composition that the concept of world literature emerges most clearly. This study seeks to re-think the ways in which we read world literature and shows how the literary letter, in old and new forms, speaks powerfully again in this period.