Mystic River, the brilliant and award-winning contemporary crime fiction novel by Dennis Lehane, is the tale of three Boston buddies whose lives took divergent courses after one fateful day when they were kids. Now, twenty-five years later, another deeply tragic event, have not just brought them together, but has also set them off on a collision course from which no one can hope to escape unscathed.

Not surprisingly, the most obvious theme running through David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers is conflict, however; it’s not the obvious conflict of the Iraq War as a whole. Instead, Finkel focuses on the internal conflict within the soldiers fighting the war on the ground and on the Iraqi citizens of Rustamiyah trying to find [...]

India is in the throes of massive and multi-dimensional socio-economic change. That has already – in some circles at least – become cliché. Also, a lot of people are determined to call this change unqualified progress, a clear sign that India is poised to take her ‘rightful’ position at the world’s high table soon. They [...]

 
“You don’t owe nothing to dead people”

Cormac McCarthy, one of the most revered contemporary American fiction writers, won acclaim in literary circles with books like Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses and especially his latest work The Road for which he was awarded with the Pulitzer Prize in 2007. However, one might safely state that [...]

The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, written by James M. Cain, an exponent in the hardboiled school of writing, were two of the great masterpieces in American literature, and sources for famous film noir adaptations. Both featured gripping tales of lust, murder, double crosses and betrayal, and abounded in nihilism and wry cynicism.

“Hurry it up, you Hoosier bastard! I could hang a dozen men while you’re fooling around”. The last words of Carl Panzram, uttered to his executioner-to-be, are a chilling insight into one of history’s most prolific serial killers. However, even more disturbing are the memoirs that he penned in prison, and handed through the bars [...]

Kaalbela is an acclaimed and an award-winning Bengali novel by Samaresh Majumdar. Set in Calcutta during the turbulent 1970’s, while on one hand it tracks the birth of the Naxalism – a far-Left urban guerrilla movement, through its protagonist Animesh Mitra, on the other it is a deeply personal tale of love and camaraderie during the times of revolution.

It’s a fearsome task for authors to make readers feel afraid these days. They all seem to have been there, screamed at all that. Haunted houses are passe. Even murderous cellphones, toothy vaginas, mail order cannibals and happiness sucking insects have to pull out all stops to scare the readers. But what if the [...]

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart, the center cannot hold,
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
The epigraph of Things Fall Apart quotes the above four lines from Yeats’ poem. While the original lines of Yeats’ poem continue with blasphemous details of his own era – full [...]

If one thing can be gleaned from Tom Folsom’s The Mad Ones: Crazy Joe Gallo and the Revolution at the Edge of the Underworld, it’s that they certainly didn’t call Joe Gallo “Crazy Joe” for nothing. In many ways, he was a textbook example of a juvenile delinquent turned complete sociopath. Crazy Joe robbed, killed, [...]