THE FOLDED EARTH: PUBLISHING SOON IN THE US

THE FOLDED EARTH is coming out in April 2012 in the US, published by the Free Press, as An Atlas of Impossible Longing was. If you want an early, free copy, there is a giveaway on Goodreads -- have a look here. The giveaway closes in about 3 weeks. Watch this space for the cover... I still haven't seen it, and can hardly wait.


The British paperback

The Folded Earth has been out in India and the UK for about a year and has had some great reviews -- you can look at excerpts and go to the links here. It was shortlisted for the Hindu Literary Prize and longlisted for the Man Asia Literary Award alongside Haruki Murakami's IQ84 -- I love Murakami's writing so I was delighted to be on a list with him (and almost as pleased that when my book was knocked out in the shortlist, so was his!)

The good news about both An Atlas of Impossible Longing and The Folded Earth is that they will soon be out in Arabic, published by Dar al Adab, a Beirut-based press that publishes Elias Khoury and other excellent writers. Very happy that my books will be on their list. The other translations of the books are listed here.

The Folded Earth also had an outing at the Jaipur Lit Fest, where I read from it. Will post a few pictures soon -- don't have any yet. But for people looking in general for pics from the Jaipur lit fest, there are tons of pictures of each day's activities posted by an agency, Solaris.

And finally, both the UK (Maclehose Press) and Indian (Hachette India) paperback editions of The Folded Earth will be out in April. The British edition will have the gorgeous new cover shown above.

Painting a Residency

I spent most of May and a part of June at the De Pure Fiction residency in a tiny, isolated hamlet in the Occitanie in France. To write about the place and what it did to my work and to me will take time -- to reflect, to let things settle. Meanwhile, Isabelle Desesquelles, the French novelist who runs the residency, asked me a set of questions before I left, and has posted it on the blog with watercolours I painted while I was there. La Lettre #36 _______________ Anuradha Roy a publié cinq romans. Elle a résidé à la maison De Pure Fiction en ce printemps pour son prochain livre et depuis, les chevreuils, les oiseaux - rouge-gorge familier, huppe fasciée, pivert, coucou - les lézards verts, les libellules bleues, les papillons semblent s’être mis eux aussi à la lecture, la cherchant sous les pétales d’un coquelicot ou au travers du feuillage des oliviers. Peut-être même, tous, envisagent-ils de faire le voyage jusqu’en Inde et l'Himalaya où Anuradha Roy vit, ...

Begum Anees Khan

Once a week around midday, Maulvi Sah’b would come in through the gates of our school in Hyderabad and class would divide briskly into two and troop off to different parts of the building. Those who were Muslim would be at religious instruction classes with him for the next half hour while the others trudged through moral science lessons. Something similar happened during language classes. We would hear a singsong chorus of “A-salaam-aleikum, Aunty”, from the Urdu classroom as we sat at our Sanskrit or Telugu lessons. Through my nomadic childhood, I’ve been at many schools. None exemplified the idea of secular India as intensely as this Muslim school in Hyderabad. Begum Anees Khan, who made it so, died in Hyderabad on August 16. Her passing feels symbolic, as if it signifies the death of a quixotic idea. Anees Khan was not given to seeking the limelight or making speeches. She never spelled out her secularism. It was instinctive: instead of words, there was act...

THROWING IT OUT AND STARTING AGAIN

One evening in 2007, just as I was sitting down to dinner in Delhi, my then-brand-new publisher phoned from London. In the marvelously parenthetical, elliptical manner that was to become familiar to me over the next few years, he began talking of symphonies. Had I considered, he wanted to know, how symphonies are structured? “Not really? Well, as it happens . . .” After around ten minutes of his apparently aimless lecture on music, my interrupted dinner stone cold, the penny dropped: On the brink of publication, he wanted me to rethink my opening chapter. (Read it here in Catapult) After I hung up, I returned to my plate of congealed food in silence. My husband and I were to drive up to our hill home at dawn—a holiday to celebrate the end of my endless first novel. And now at the eleventh hour this bombshell about the opening chapter. Even a novice knows that changing an opening chapter is rather more difficult than changing a concluding chapter because it means having to lo...

anuradha roy

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