Amitav Ghosh turns 64 today! We are sharing our love for the master storyteller through a short snapshot of his life.
Author: Sanskriti Nagar
I'm a storyteller on a journey - to connect people with places, the past with the present, the contemporary with the traditional. I'm just stepping into the shoes of an explorer, aspiring to be a globetrotter, and someday, a novelist. Follow me through my journeys, and if something does resonate with you, or you'd like me to cover a story for you, I'd love to catch up. (PS: I love coffee!)
800,000 people. Killed in 100 days. The ugly history of the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and its haunting aftermath is the subject of this mind-numbing book by Philip Gourevitch
Hilary Mantel, one of our favourite writers, turns 68 today. So we decided to share our appreciation of her and provide a short snapshot of her life.
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Releasing in July 2020
A list of all the amazing new books coming out this month!
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22 Must Read Books About Rwanda
A treasure trove of essential books you must read about Rwanda
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July 2020 Issue | Rwanda
Exploring Rwanda through literature this month
No other book comes as close to Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi in telling us the story of modern India. Meticulously researched and fascinating, this should be one of our mandatory reads!
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Releasing in June 2020
A whole bunch of exciting books releasing this month!
Six wives of King Henry VIII. Each of whom was a fascinating person in her own right. This is the detailed account of each of those women whose fate lay in the hands of one of England’s most famous kings.
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Releasing in May 2020
Find out which new books are releasing this month!
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Followers by Megan Angelo
An extremely original and thought-provoking novel, Followers by Megan Angelo, delves into the nature of friendship, belonging and loneliness in an Internet obsessed society and its implications for the future.
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Releasing in April 2020
Ready to add new books to your TBR pile? Here are some exciting books releasing this month!
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Releasing In March 2020
Which of these will you be reading in March?
The Magical Language of Others is a memoir by E J Koh that spans multiple generations and explores the complexities of transgressions that mothers and daughters commit, hard-won selfhood and the deeply painful but loving bonds one has to family, places, and memories.
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Lady Clementine by Marie Benedict
Lady Clementine is a first-person fictional account of Clementine, wife of Winston Churchill, who played an extremely influential role in her husband’s life and in the politics of her time.
In a story of accountability and guilt, an aging Japanese painter reminisces and takes stock of his past in the aftermath of World War II to understand if he truly is culpable for the decisions he made before and during the war
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Hatchet by Gary Paulsen
Inspired by his own true adventures, Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet, published in 1986, is a spellbinding story of survival and transformation for young adults
Ablaze is a meticulously researched account of events leading to the Chernobyl nuclear explosion; the confusion, the secrecy and the lies that reigned in its aftermath; and the eventual fall of the Soviet Union.
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Releasing In January 2020
Which of these will you be reading in January?
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January 2020 Issue | 1986
Join us on a literary exploration of the year 1986 this month
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The Heretic Queen by Michelle Moran
Nefertari, a forgotten princess, must fight against her past, earn the love of Egypt’s people and win a place for herself by the man she loves, Pharaoh Ramesses II
The Measure of Our Lives is a keepsake for the fans of Toni Morrison that highlights some of the best quotations from her fictional and non-fictional work
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The Instigators by David Wolman
What can a group of organized youngsters and social media do together? Well, they can (and did) start a revolution and topple an entire government.
In Cairo – The City Victorious, Max Rodenbeck takes his readers on a fascinating journey spanning 5,000 years through a city that has never stopped reinventing itself.
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Releasing In December 2019
Find out which books are going to hit the bookshelves in December 2019.
Join us on an intellectually stimulating adventure as we explore Egypt through literature this month.
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How The Book Has Changed Over Time
The book form has undergone a tremendous reincarnation over the ages. Find out how far they’ve come in the last 5,500 years.
The Great Derangement is a frightening, albeit a realistic discourse on the current climate change crisis and its effects, especially on the peoples of Asia.
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A Bridge For Passing by Pearl S Buck
This book is an intimate, candid narration of Pearl S Buck’s personal journey as she crosses the bridge from marriage to widowhood.
Who are we when pushed to the edges of our human boundaries? What all are we capable of in extreme situations? Dexter Dias seeks to answer some of the most complex moral dilemmas of our age, through real interviews and latest scientific research, in this book of massive proportions.
Starting this month, we will be transforming Of B&B into a magazine, the way we had originally intended it to be. Every month, we will select a theme and explore literature through the lens of that theme. Sounds exciting?
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Releasing In November 2019
From books by some of our favorite authors to works on topics we are deeply interested in, here’s a list of the book releases we are eagerly anticipating this month!
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Releasing In October 2019
It’s going to be raining books this month! What will you be reading?
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Releasing In September 2019
A lot of interesting titles coming up in September! Which ones will you be reading?
The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail, remains to this day, one of the most successful conspiracy theory books ever written. What makes it so controversial?
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Releasing In August 2019
Which new books will you discover in August?
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Releasing In July 2019
Which new book releases will you discover in July?
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How Do You Design “Lolita”?
Designing “Lolita” makes one examine the lust for literature, the lust for design, and the subject of the book itself – which is lust
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Releasing In June 2019
Eagerly waiting to get hold of some of these book releasing in June
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Releasing In May 2019
A select list of new releases from some of our favorite authors and our favorite genres that are set to hit the shelves this month.
In this provocative, sarcastic and powerful essay, Ursula Le Guin examines gender stereotypes, feminism and identity
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Releasing In April 2019
A select list of new releases from some of our favorite authors and our favorite genres that are set to hit the shelves this month.
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Hippie by Paulo Coelho
Hippie, Paulo Coelho’s most autobiographical book, is a nostalgic trip down memory lane about his days as a hippie, and is a beautiful story about friendship, love, the search for meaning and realizing that getting closer to oneself demands many tough choices.
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Releasing In March 2019
We love the sight of a fresh month. New things to add to our monthly planners including reading plans for some new releases from our favorite authors and genres. Check out what’s releasing in March.
Sideshadowing allows the reader to stop looking at the narrative and its timeline linearly and instead consider the set of alternate possibilities, viewing time as “open” just as in real life.
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Releasing In February 2019
Find out which books are all set to release in February 2019 that have us so excited!
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Red Sorghum by Mo Yan
Red Sorghum is a novel about the brutal terror, pillage and rape that innocent civilians had to face in the dark days of the Chinese civil war and the Sino-Japanese war in the 1930s.
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The Best Books of 2018
2018 was a great year for Of B&B as we started out on an adventure to bring literature into mainstream dialogue. From poetry to feminist non-fiction, scandalising history to psychology, we discovered some very interesting and insightful books in the past year. Here are some of our favourites that we absolutely recommend to our readers.
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Releasing In January 2019
It’s a brand new year! 2019 is going to be an interesting time for us. More features in our magazine, more interviews and of course, more new books to read. Here’s what we are looking forward to in January
This week, we read the essay, The Power of Persuasion by Mario Vargas Llosa from his book, Letters to a Young Novelist. Llosa shares some great advice for writers, talking about a novel’s form and how, in great novels, form and content are not really separate from each other.
This week, we spoke to Dr. Mini Chandran, a professor at IIT Kanpur and an expert on literary censorship to understand its state in India, the circumstances in which it thrives and the true cost of it on writers.
Rajendra Nagar, a historian and writer talks about the importance of literature, how it has shaped the human race and how a single word brought about all the stories we know, speak of and create today.
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Releasing In December 2018
We can’t wait to get our hands on some of these books releasing in December.
To my mind, for a number of years, the gothic genre meant horror. Eerie looking witches. Haunted castles. High-pitched screams. Dark. Damp. Depressing. But that’s not all that the genre is.
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Suttree by Cormac McCarthy
Humans are so full of silences and screams and suspense that we look forward to the next day with equal parts enthusiasm and equal parts anxiety. Thoughts of doom and death are never far from one’s mind. Suttree, difficult though its prose is, makes all this vocal, almost visual.
Alenka Sottler, an award-winning Slovenian painter and illustrator, talks about her love for painting and literature, the art of illustration and the immense power that depicting human faces on book covers can have on readers.
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Releasing In November 2018
What’s new this November? Check out some of the books we are eagerly anticipating!
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Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
Once upon a time, six human species roamed the Earth. Now, only one does. What happened to the others? How did Sapiens gain dominance of the entire world? How did we progress through history, build empires, become a global community that we are today? More importantly, what does it truly tell us about ourselves and where we are headed?
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Releasing In October 2018
It’s that time of the month when we take a look at upcoming books we are eagerly awaiting. From new releases from some of our favourite authors, to books from our favourite genres, here is a select list that we are looking forward to getting our hands on in October.
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The Bibliophile’s Affair with Instagram
“Don’t judge a book by its cover”. And yet, a lot of Instagrammers are obsessed with showing us their reads. Is this plain vanity? Or does it speak of a deeper love?
Great storytelling is more just a great story idea. If it’s not written well, the reader is unlikely to be entertained enough to want to read through till the end of your novel. This where a literary device like foreshadowing can lend massive depth to your plot, to the characters and to the dramatic effect, something you cannot afford to leave out if you want your readers to be hooked to your book.
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Sea Prayer by Khaled Hosseini
War. Destruction. The never after. In Sea Prayer, a beautifully written, poignant piece, Khaled Hosseini commemorates the death of Alan Khurdi, the 3-year-old Syrian boy whose body washed ashore the coast of Turkey in 2015 as he tried to flee a war-torn Syria, by way of the sea. The image of Alan’s lifeless body sparked a massive emotional response, opening the eyes of the rest of the world to the horrors of the Syrian situation and the trauma of refugees.
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Releasing In September 2018
Ah, new books! Every bookworm’s delight. It’s time to take a look at the ones that are expected to be up for grabs in September. Here is a select list from some of our favourite authors that we are eagerly awaiting!
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Human Traces by Sebastian Faulks
What does it mean to be human? Is madness the price we pay for it? Sebastian Faulks explores this fragile thread that connects human consciousness with the depravity of the mind in his novel, Human Traces.
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Why Celebrate Literature
In an age where ‘Netflix and chill’ is the preferred weekend pursuit (don’t get us wrong, we indulge in it too), the question we are asking is – Does literature have any value today?
