nilanjana s roy

Tag: fiction

  • Speaking Volumes: Han Kang and (in)humanity

    Speaking Volumes: Han Kang and (in)humanity

    May is an ominous month for students. In 1989, thousands of students spent the month marching and gathering in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, after the death of the liberal reformer Hu Yaobang. The answer to their demands for democratic reform and more freedoms came on May 20, when martial law was declared in Beijing. Citizens […]

  • Günter Grass and the losers of history

    Günter Grass and the losers of history

    (Published in the Business Standard, April 14, 2015) When I heard that Gunter Grass had died at 87, in the town of Lubek, I thought of what he had been at 17 and 18. He was still a boy then, despite what he’d seen in World War Two. He weighed just 110 pounds in his […]

  • The BS column: Anita Desai’s world

    (Published in the Business Standard, November 12, 2012) There is a clear division in the minds of most readers between writers who write guidebook-fiction, and writers who write to understand their world, and end by changing yours. Fiction-as-guidebook writers are often technically dazzling—Jonathan Lethem, Philip Roth—but in essence, they do not write to understand their […]

  • 140-word fiction: Nine Lives

    (Sunday Mid-Day asked for a cat story, in 140 words. Here it is.) My nine lives? I had a house, once, and Bigfeet of my own: then they packed everything, except me, and left. There was a word for kittens who wandered outside for the first time: prey. Seven bird kills, eight battles with rats, […]

  • The Wildings: Reviews, in Junglee

    (For The Wildings website, go here; to order a copy, go here.) Reviewer, hard at work. What the reviewers say: (Mostly) Ayes: “A few pages into Nilanjana Roy’s The Wildings, you’ll wish you had whiskers and could mew. The world as imagined by Roy in this remarkable debut is filled with marvels, not the least of which is the […]

  • Prabha Mallya: Illustrator’s Note

    Prabha Mallya: Illustrator’s Note

    Nilanjana Roy’s The Wildings, on my third reading of it (a couple of months after the last illustration for the book was handed in) still moves me deeply. It was always meant to be an illustrated book. The story reveals a living, vibrant, layered world that exists right here part of our bustling human settlements, that […]

  • About The Wildings

    Mara’s story She was an orange kitten with deep green eyes, no bigger than the palm of my partner’s hand. Mara had been rescued from a drain in Sujan Singh Park by my cousin, and was temporarily living with them and their three dogs. “We have to find someone to adopt her!” said Kamini. “Yes,” […]