In a world governed by caste and patriarchy, Shaili, an ambitious Dalit journalist, grapples with heartbreak, disquiet, and the pernicious constraints imposed upon her desires and agency. Apurva, in love with a Dalit man from a rival sub-caste, is forcibly married to a Marxist from her own community, unleashing turmoil that reshapes her life. Pragya and Samar, a Dalit couple united by a shared passion for political activism, find their marriage strained as the fires of the street no longer ignite intimacy at home. Ambar, a rising star in the corporate world, feels doubly alienated—from both her Dalit mother’s village and her own amorous desires in the city. Meanwhile, tormented and brutalized by upper-caste oppressors, Jamna seizes justice on her own terms—transforming revenge into fierce rebellion against decades of caste terror and humiliation. The unforgettable characters in these remarkable stories are ordinary Dalit women and men navigating passion, pleasure, power, and pain in the crucible of caste, gender, and sexuality in contemporary India. Radiantly and elegantly translated into English, and ethnographically assembled for the first time, Love in the Time of Caste is a groundbreaking anthology of Dalit-feminist creativity and repair that portrays love as a radical, anti-caste force, offering an unflinching portrait of modern India—as imagined and remade by Dalit-Bahujans—while boldly envisioning caste-annihilated futures.

In a world governed by caste and patriarchy, Shaili, an ambitious Dalit journalist, grapples with heartbreak, disquiet, and the pernicious constraints imposed upon her desires and agency. Apurva, in love with a Dalit man from a rival sub-caste, is forcibly married to a Marxist from her own community, unleashing turmoil that reshapes her life. Pragya and Samar, a Dalit couple united by a shared passion for political activism, find their marriage strained as the fires of the street no longer ignite intimacy at home. Ambar, a rising star in the corporate world, feels doubly alienated—from both her Dalit mother’s village and her own amorous desires in the city. Meanwhile, tormented and brutalized by upper-caste oppressors, Jamna seizes justice on her own terms—transforming revenge into fierce rebellion against decades of caste terror and humiliation. The unforgettable characters in these remarkable stories are ordinary Dalit women and men navigating passion, pleasure, power, and pain in the crucible of caste, gender, and sexuality in contemporary India. Radiantly and elegantly translated into English, and ethnographically assembled for the first time, Love in the Time of Caste is a groundbreaking anthology of Dalit-feminist creativity and repair that portrays love as a radical, anti-caste force, offering an unflinching portrait of modern India—as imagined and remade by Dalit-Bahujans—while boldly envisioning caste-annihilated futures.

In the 1880s, as the European powers were carving up Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium seized for himself the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. Carrying out a genocidal plundering of the Congo, he looted its rubber, brutalized its people, and ultimately slashed its population by ten million--all the while shrewdly cultivating his reputation as a great humanitarian. Heroic efforts to expose these crimes eventually led to the first great human rights movement of the twentieth century, in which everyone from Mark Twain to the Archbishop of Canterbury participated. King Leopold's Ghost is the haunting account of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions, a man as cunning, charming, and cruel as any of the great Shakespearean villains. It is also the deeply moving portrait of those who fought Leopold: a brave handful of missionaries, travelers, and young idealists who went to Africa for work or adventure and unexpectedly found themselves witnesses to a holocaust. Adam Hochschild brings this largely untold story alive with the wit and skill of a Barbara Tuchman. Like her, he knows that history often provides a far richer cast of characters than any novelist could invent. Chief among them is Edmund Morel, a young British shipping agent who went on to lead the international crusade against Leopold. Another hero of this tale, the Irish patriot Roger Casement, ended his life on a London gallows. Two courageous black Americans, George Washington Williams and William Sheppard, risked much to bring evidence of the Congo atrocities to the outside world. Sailing into the middle of the story was a young Congo River steamboat officer named Joseph Conrad. And looming above them all, the duplicitous billionaire King Leopold II. With great power and compassion, King Leopold's Ghost will brand the tragedy of the Congo--too long forgotten--onto the conscience of the West

In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet—sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors—doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through. Exit West follows these characters as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are. Profoundly intimate and powerfully inventive, it tells an unforgettable story of love, loyalty, and courage that is both completely of our time and for all time.

In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet—sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors—doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through. Exit West follows these characters as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are. Profoundly intimate and powerfully inventive, it tells an unforgettable story of love, loyalty, and courage that is both completely of our time and for all time.

An accidental meeting at a seminar brings Ketaki and Aditya, two academics based in the United States, together. Well established in their careers, with romantic and marital relationships behind them, they are located in different cities in what the author calls the ‘new world’ or Navabhum, while the ‘old world’ or Purabhum has long been left behind. Neither is in search of a relationship, but they find themselves falling deeply and inexorably in love. Even as the new world opens up infinite possibilities, the old world casts its gentle shadow over their lives and touches everything. Where, the author asks, will their love take them? Susham Bedi’s moving and delicately crafted novel is brought to us in this sensitive and nuanced translation by Astri Ghosh.

Known and celebrated in her time, Guli Sadarangani, the first woman writer of Sindh, later sank into oblivion. Perhaps this was because she dared to write about a Hindu-Muslim romance that culminated in marriage. The novel that told this story, Ittehad, was first published in undivided India, and later appeared under another title, Melaapi Jeevan. Rita Kothari’s elegant and empathetic translation of the love story of Asha and Hamid teases out the nuances of their understated relationship and reveals how pre-Independence and pre-Partition India held so many possibilities of living and loving together. Perhaps that is why, the translator speculates, members of the Sindhi community trying to find their feet in post-Partition India were uncertain of showcasing a writer whose writings represented a world that no longer seemed possible.

In the 1880s, as the European powers were carving up Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium seized for himself the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. Carrying out a genocidal plundering of the Congo, he looted its rubber, brutalized its people, and ultimately slashed its population by ten million--all the while shrewdly cultivating his reputation as a great humanitarian. Heroic efforts to expose these crimes eventually led to the first great human rights movement of the twentieth century, in which everyone from Mark Twain to the Archbishop of Canterbury participated. King Leopold's Ghost is the haunting account of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions, a man as cunning, charming, and cruel as any of the great Shakespearean villains. It is also the deeply moving portrait of those who fought Leopold: a brave handful of missionaries, travelers, and young idealists who went to Africa for work or adventure and unexpectedly found themselves witnesses to a holocaust. Adam Hochschild brings this largely untold story alive with the wit and skill of a Barbara Tuchman. Like her, he knows that history often provides a far richer cast of characters than any novelist could invent. Chief among them is Edmund Morel, a young British shipping agent who went on to lead the international crusade against Leopold. Another hero of this tale, the Irish patriot Roger Casement, ended his life on a London gallows. Two courageous black Americans, George Washington Williams and William Sheppard, risked much to bring evidence of the Congo atrocities to the outside world. Sailing into the middle of the story was a young Congo River steamboat officer named Joseph Conrad. And looming above them all, the duplicitous billionaire King Leopold II. With great power and compassion, King Leopold's Ghost will brand the tragedy of the Congo--too long forgotten--onto the conscience of the West

In the mode of Flights, a novel about the rich stories of small places, from the Nobel Prize-winning, New York Times-bestselling author.When the narrator of House of Day, House of Night arrives with her husband in a village in remote southwest Poland, she knows no one. Before long, though, she discovers that everyone--and everything—there has a story. With the help of her neighbor, the eccentric Marta, she pieces together the fragments of the living and the dead. There’s the drunk Marek Marek, who discovers he shares his body with a bird, and Franz Frost, whose nightmares come to him from a newly discovered planet. There’s the man whose death – with one leg on the Polish side, one on the Czech - was an international incident. And there are the German soldiers, not long departed, who still haunt the region. Shard by shard, from the founding of the town to the lives of its saints, these stories capture not only a history but a cosmology.Another brilliant “constellation novel” in the mode of her Booker-winning Flights, House of Day, House of Night interweaves narrative, musings, history, and mythology, reminding us that the story of any place, no matter how humble, is fascinating and boundless, and awaits any of us with the imagination to seek it.

A radiant novel of longing that blooms between two boys over the course of one summer—about family, desire, and what we inherit—from celebrated author Tash Aw. When his grandfather dies, a boy named Jay travels south with his family to the property he left them, a once flourishing farm that has fallen into disrepair. The trees are diseased, the fields parched from months of drought. Still, Jay’s father, Jack, sends him out to work the land, or whatever land is left. Over the course of these hot, dense days, Jay finds himself drawn to Chuan, the local son of the farm’s manager, different from him in every way except for one. Out in the fields, and on the streets into town, the charge between the boys intensifies. Inside the house, the other family members confront their own regrets, and begin to drift apart. Like the land around them, they are powerless to resist the global forces that threaten to render their lives obsolete. At once sweeping and intimate, The South is a story of what happens when private and public lives collide. It is the first in a quartet of novels that form Tash Aw’s masterful portrait of a family navigating a period of great change—a reimagined epic for our times.

The bestselling Turkish classic of love and longing in a changing world, available in English for the first time.'It is, perhaps, easier to dismiss a man whose face gives no indication of an inner life. And what a pity that is: a dash of curiosity is all it takes to stumble upon treasures we never expected.' A shy young man leaves his home in rural Turkey to learn a trade in 1920s Berlin. The city's crowded streets, thriving arts scene, passionate politics and seedy cabarets provide the backdrop for a chance meeting with a woman, which will haunt him for the rest of his life. Emotionally powerful, intensely atmospheric and touchingly profound, Madonna in a Fur Coat is an unforgettable novel about new beginnings and the unfathomable nature of the human soul.'Passionate but clear . . . Ali's success [is in ] his ability to describe the emergence of a feeling, seemingly straightforward from the outside but swinging back and forth between opposite extremes at its core, revealing the tensions that accompanies such rise and fall.' Atilla Özkirimli, writer and literary historian

The bestselling Turkish classic of love and longing in a changing world, available in English for the first time.'It is, perhaps, easier to dismiss a man whose face gives no indication of an inner life. And what a pity that is: a dash of curiosity is all it takes to stumble upon treasures we never expected.' A shy young man leaves his home in rural Turkey to learn a trade in 1920s Berlin. The city's crowded streets, thriving arts scene, passionate politics and seedy cabarets provide the backdrop for a chance meeting with a woman, which will haunt him for the rest of his life. Emotionally powerful, intensely atmospheric and touchingly profound, Madonna in a Fur Coat is an unforgettable novel about new beginnings and the unfathomable nature of the human soul.'Passionate but clear . . . Ali's success [is in ] his ability to describe the emergence of a feeling, seemingly straightforward from the outside but swinging back and forth between opposite extremes at its core, revealing the tensions that accompanies such rise and fall.' Atilla Özkirimli, writer and literary historian

We collectively build and collectively shatter—every broken window is a new opportunity; every burnt ember is construction material. This is a book of failure and mistakes; it begins with what is stolen from us and proposes only an invitation to imagine. In these playful written experiments, Lola Olufemi deftly navigates the space between what we have been told, what we know to be true and what we cannot yet conceive. Weaving together fragmentary reflections and prose poetry, this is an exploration of the possibility of living differently, grounded in black feminist scholarship and community work. Olufemi shows that the horizon is not an immaterial state we gesture toward. Instead, propelled by the motion of thinking against and beyond, we must invent the future now and never let go of the otherwise.

Chronicling the life and death of the father of western philosophy, and charting his influence on the most influential ancient Greek philosophers, Plato's The Last Days of Socrates is translated from the Greek by Hugh Tredennick, revised with an introduction and notes by Harold Tarrant in Penguin Classics. The trial and condemnation of Socrates on charges of heresy and corrupting young minds is a defining moment in the history of Classical Athens. In tracing these events through four dialogues, Plato also developed his own philosophy, based on Socrates' manifesto for a life guided by self-responsibility. Euthyphro finds Socrates outside the court-house, debating the nature of piety, while the Apology is his robust rebuttal of the charges of impiety and a defence of the philosopher's life. In the Crito, while awaiting execution in prison, Socrates counters the arguments of friends urging him to escape. Finally, in the Phaedo, he is shown calmly confident in the face of death, skilfully arguing the case for the immortality of the soul. Hugh Tredennick's landmark 1954 translation has been revised by Harold Tarrant, reflecting changes in Platonic studies, with an introduction and expanded introductions to each of the four dialogues. Plato (c.427-347 BC) stands with Socrates and Aristotle as one of the shapers of the whole intellectual tradition of the West. He founded the Academy in Athens, the first permanent institution devoted to philosophical research and teaching, and the prototype of all Western universities. If you enjoyed The Last Days of Socrates, you might like Plato's The Symposium, also available in Penguin Classics.

While his literary reputation rests mainly on such celebrated novels as Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Idiot, Dostoyevsky also wrote much superb short fiction. The Double is one of the finest of his shorter works. It appeared in 1846 (his second published work) and is by far the most significant of his early stories, not least for its successful, straight-faced treatment of a hallucinatory theme.In The Double, the protagonist, Golyadkin senior, is persecuted by his double, Golyadkin junior, who resembles him closely in almost every detail. The latter abuses the former with mounting scorn and brutality as the tale proceeds toward its frightening denouement. Characteristic Dostoyevskyan themes of helplessness, victimization, and scandal are beautifully handled here with an artistry that qualifies the story as a small masterpiece.Students of literature, admirers of Dostoyevsky, and general readers will all be delighted to have this classic work available in this inexpensive but high-quality edition.

What does the Right offer to women? How does the Right mobilize women? Why is the Right succeeding in opposing women's rights? With the stark precision and forceful passion that characterize all of her work, Andrea Dworkin answers these timely questions. And by providing the first clear analysis of the impact on women of the Right's position on abortion, homosexuality, anti-Semitism, female poverty, and antifeminism, she demonstrates how the Right attempts both to exploit and to quiet women's deepest fears. — From the reverse cover.

The author received three separate requests for a gift of one guinea-one for a women’s college building fund, one for a society promoting the employment of professional women, and one to help prevent war and “protect culture, and intellectual liberty.” This book is a threefold answer to these requests-and a statement of feminine purpose.

After 1989, capitalism has presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system. What effects has this “capitalist realism” had on work, culture, education and mental health? Is it possible to imagine an alternative to capitalism that is not some throwback to discredited models of state control?