FROM THE ELLIOT BAY BOOK COMPANY, SEATTLE, A STORY

From Courtney Shannon Strand, former About.com Guide

“The story of how I came to find and read Anuradha Roy’s beautiful novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, is not as long as the distance I went to find it. In Delhi en route to a literature festival in Jaipur this past January, I stumbled totally by chance into a reception honoring British publisher Christopher MacLehose. His hosts, Rukun Advani and Anuradha Roy, run a terrific independent academic press, Permanent Black. Talking about the role of academic publishers in India, then how a clearly significant press composed of two people, doing everything, managed to function: that was my introduction to Anuradha Roy.

I shortly learned— not terribly directly —that she had written a novel, one published in India and numerous other countries. Notes were made, and when I was in Faqir Chand and Sons’ legendary bookshop the next day, a Picador India edition of An Atlas of Impossible Longing was miraculously (to my eye) produced from the shelves of the most unfathomably organized bookshop I think I’ve ever seen.

An Atlas of Impossible Longing itself was more than fathomable even though it carries considerable mystery at its heart. Set over a span of years in early 20th-century Bengal, it tells of people brought together and then wrenched apart by circumstances historical, cultural and natural, all at once. Betrayals, secrets, chance, human greed and machination all play a big part, but a deep-set current of longing, keeping some indescribable purpose, ineffable and alive over time, no matter what waylaying occurs, makes it a particularly memorable, resonant book. It’s one of those rare books where time, rhythm, breathing change as one reads. You truly enter the book, the book inhabits you. It’s also one of the most assured novels I’ve read in some time, never mind that it’s a debut. Every character, every setting, shift of scene, situation—rings true.

Upon return to the US after India, I found myself in that nowhere-land of having this amazing, transporting book to recommend, but no easy way to put it in others’ hands. Elliott Bay imported several from the UK, selling them briskly. Everyone who got it came back, saying how wonderful it was, wanting to buy additional copies to give to others. Getting ready to place reorders overseas, we received the welcome news that Free Press would be publishing An Atlas of Impossible Longing in spring 2011.”—Rick Simonson, Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle, WA

READ THE ARTICLE IN ITS ORIGINAL SITE HERE.

All the Lives We Never Lived wins the Sahitya Akademi Award 2022

Anuradha Roy bags coveted Sahitya Akademi Award, 22 others feted Anuradha Roy bagged the coveted Sahitya Akademi Award on Thursday. The author of 'All The Lives We Never Lived ' was felicitated along with 22 other authors for their exemplary contribution in the field of literature. This is the fourth book penned by the 40-something Roy. This book also won the prestigious Tata Book of the Year Award for Fiction in 2018. The book revolves around the life and times of a horticulturalist Myshkin, who narrates his life story, and his unending wait for letters from etters from the mother who abandoned him, for greener pastures in another country. Roy, who lives in Ranikhet, has previously written 'An Atlas of Impossible Longing', 'The Folded Earth' and 'Sleeping on Jupiter' which won the DSC Prize for Fiction 2016. It was also longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in the year 2015. Read more at: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/ma

Language, Lost and Found

In France for a long spell earlier this year, everyone around me speaking in a language I didn’t speak or read, I began to think about the many streams of language I've swum in. My mother tongue, Bengali, was the language of home and of intimacy. Yet somewhere along those years, with a sigh drowned out by babel, the language had left me. I tried to find my way back to it through writers like Leela Majumdar and Bibhutibhushan. In "Language, Lost and Found" out now in Noema Magazine, I write of how I found it again, and of language in alien contexts. I'm not sure if this essay is travelogue or memoir or a bunch of stories. But here it is, and I hope you will read it. It was a red paperback with a green, winking cat spread across its large front. Just a few taps pulls it up on my screen now, and I wonder if my mental image of the day my father came with it as a gift for my brother and me is the work of memory or imagination. He walks in as if he has a happy secret and l

Ten years of Anuradha Roy’s ‘An Atlas of Impossible Longing’: What the writer and publisher remember ‘For three years, it was an alternative, secret universe in which I lived, awake or asleep.’ On serendipity and the difficult road to getting published: Anuradha Roy, writer Read this in Scroll.in Christopher MacLehose and Anuradha Roy. Photograph by Rukun Advani An Atlas of Impossible Longing started in one of those “dummy books” – blank pages, hardbound – that binderies used to make to establish accurately the spine width of books that they would bind for a publisher. The publishing house was one my partner and I had recently set up. It had no capital but our savings, no office, and the only books as yet were dummies with blank pages. Because I still have that notebook, I know I wrote the first section of Atlas in pencil, in a non-stop scrawl that poured out without warning. It went on for a few pages and then came to a stop, after which the notebook

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