South Asian Literary Fiction

It has been a terrific year. I graduated law school, got married (!), inched closer to finding my way home, and I’m looking at several long-term career options, including one in my adopted hometown of Suva, Fiji!

However, I haven’t read as much as I would like to because law school and studying for the bar exam kills any sort of creative thought. I bought my partner a Nook HD+, the Barnes and Nobles reader, but I think I may now start using it more than her. If anyone reading this blog is a Nook user, feel free to add me as a friend, email: plal@law.gwu.edu

My list of things to read includes mostly all the recently-released, award-winning or award-nominated South Asian fiction that I can find on the web:

Jamil Ahmad: The Wandering Falcon*
Alice Albinia: Leela’s Book
Tahmima Anam: The Good Muslim
U.R. Ananthamurthy: Bharathipura
Nadeem Aslam: The Blind Man’s Garden
Benyamin: Goat Days
Rahul Bhattacharya: The Sly Company of People Who Care
Chandrakanta: A Street in Srinagar
Renita D’ Silva: Monsoon Memories
Roopa Farooki: The Flying Man
Musharraf Ali Farooqi: Between Clay and Dust
Amitav Ghosh: River of Smoke, The Glass Palace*
Niven Govinden: Black Bread White Beer
Sunetra Gupta: So Good in Black
Mohsin Hamid: How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia*
Mohammed Hanif: Our Lady of Alice Bhatti
Sonora Jha: Foreign
Shehan Karunatilaka: Chinaman
Usha K.R: Monkey-man
Tabish Khair: The Thing About Thugs
Sachin Kundalkar: Cobalt Blue
Uzma Aslam Khan: Thinner Than Skin
Amit Majmudar: Partition, The Abundance
Kavery Nambisan: The Story that Must Not Be Told
Nayomi Munaweera: Island of a Thousand Mirrors
Uday Prakash: The Walls of Delhi
Anuradha Roy: The Atlas of Impossible Longing, The Folded Earth*
Nilanjana Roy: The Wildings
Saswati Sengupta: The Song Seekers
Shyam Selvadurai: The Hungry Ghosts
Geetanjali Shree: The Empty Space
Jeet Thayil: Narcopolis*
Thrity Umrigar: The Space Between Us, The Weight of Heaven, The World We Found*
Manu Joseph: The Illicit Happiness of Other People*
Cyrus Mistry: Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer
Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya: The Watch

I am going to stop there because the list grows longer by the second. I also want to write more so hopefully, 2014 will be the year that I release my first book. Maybe with the time not spent in law school, I can finally do something productive.

What are you reading?