my life and times (Roli, Rs 295) by Premchand is an ?autobiographical narrative? compiled and translated from Munshi Premchand?s own Hindi-Urdu writings by Madan Gopal, a Boswellian figure in this master storyteller?s life. This is a peculiar appropriation of the writer?s voice, and is the result of Gopal having studied almost everything of consequence written by or on Premchand, including numerous unpublished letters. Yet, the result is a strangely wooden and remote narrative that never really manages to delve into the inner spaces of this undoubtedly fascinating man. Premchand?s political convictions are rather better handled, perhaps because they require a less complicated form of empathy.

towelhead (Review, ?4.25) by Alicia Erian has, for its epigraph, a line from Raymond Carver: ?We all do better in the future.? It is about Jasira, a teenage Arab-American girl, who is packed off by her mother to live with the father she barely knows. But her strict Lebanese father is unable to show her the affection she craves, or to handle Jasira?s feelings about her rapidly changing body. Saddam Hussein has invaded Kuwait, and school is a lonely place for a ?towelhead?, so Jasira begins to look for love ? in all the wrong places.

sikandar chowk park (Penguin, Rs 295) by Neelum Saran Gour is ?the story of eleven people and a bomb blast?, according to the opening sentence of the novel. After a bomb blast rips through Allahabad?s Sikandar Chowk Park, killing 57 people, a journalist pieces together the lives of eleven of the dead from the heap of mutilated bodies, all ordinary people leading ordinary lives in a quintessential mofussil Indian township. The novel moves between a documentary mode and a Rushdian plenitude of imagination and language, and this is quite remarkably effective. ?A universal malcontent this, she deduced. One of life?s permanent dissidents. But she had to confess it, even on that first occasion, he was oddly attractive.?

an introduction to journalism (Vistaar, Rs 395) by Carole Fleming et al covers diverse media and provides case studies as a guide to researching stories, interviewing and writing for each medium. There are also interviews with journalists working on a variety of news outlets like the BBC.