Melange of Genres
HYDERABAD: Vijay Seshadri, 2014 Pulitzer prize-winner for poetry was in country to participate in the fifth edition of Tata Literature Live! The Mumbai LitFest, a premier international literary festival. He shares his top five reads with City Express
Moral Imagination,
by David Bromwich (Essays on politics by Yale professor David Bromwich, a towering critic and commentator)
ABOUT BOOK: Bromwich demonstrates that moral imagination allows us to judge the right and wrong of actions apart from any benefit to ourselves, and he argues that this ability is an innate individual strength, rather than a socially conditioned habit. Political topics addressed here include Edmund Burke and Richard Price’s efforts to define patriotism in the first year of the French Revolution, Abraham Lincoln’s principled work of persuasion against slavery in the 1850s among others.
Collected Poems
by Mark Strand
(The compendium of one of the most important American poets, whose fifty-year career has produced work of remarkable compositional rigor combined with a flexible, surreal, startling imagination).
ABOUT BOOK: From Sleeping with One Eye Open(1964) through the wonderful middle work that includes The Continuous Life(1990) and crowned by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Blizzard of One(1998) and his most recent new collection, Man and Camel(2006), this book gives us an essential selection of Mark Strand’s poetry from across the entire span of his remarkable career to date.
Collison Low Crossers:
A Year Inside the Turbulent World of American Football,
by Nicholas Dawidoff
(An excellent piece of sports journalism about the violent game Americans obsessively embrace).
ABOUT BOOK: By spending a year with the New York Jets, Nicholas Dawidoff book is an absorbing, funny, and vivid narrative that gets to the heart of a massive and stressful collective endeavour. Here is football in many faces: the polarising, brilliant, and hilarious head coach; the general manager, whose job is to support (and suppress) the defensive coaches and their in-house rivals. Dawidoff makes an emblematic NFL season come alive for fans and non fans alike in a book about the much loved game.
Collected Poems
by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
(An authentic panoramic illumination results from any encounter with this modern Indian master and as for rereading)
ABOUT BOOK: Collected Poems is the first comprehensive collection of the work of one of India’s most influential English language poets. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s poetry has long been known for its mixing of the commonplace and the strange, the autobiographical and the fabulous, in which the insignificant details of everyday life-whether contemporary or historical-bring larger patterns into focus. Mehrotra’s celebrated translations from Indian languages (Prakrit, Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali) take up a third of the book.
Hopscotch
by Julio Cortazar
(translated, from the Spanish, by Gregory Rabassa) (Wonderful to re-encounter, after thirty-five years, this awesome, radical, intimate masterpiece of reflexive, sophisticated storytelling).
ABOUT BOOK: In 1966, Gregory Rabassa won the first National Book Award to recognize the work of a translator, for his English-language edition of Hopscotch. Julio Cortazar was so pleased with Rabassa’s translation of Hopscotch that he recommended the translator to Gabriel García Márquez. The book is influenced by Henry Miller’s reckless and relentless search for truth in post-decadent Paris and Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki’s modal teachings on Zen Buddhism.