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Hilarious, lyrical, witty and disturbing, these three different tales all point to the question: if all our dreaming ends in distortion and disappointment, what may we do? Write ourselves off as a failed species and let climate change lead us to well-deserved oblivion? Or keep trying to do better with more humility and an acceptance that perfection remains a distant signpost?

In “Bad People”, Ravana, Shupi and Kumbh manage to make the world veer from its destructive course and buy time for us. Ravana, of course, belongs to epic—but how does he fit into the twenty-first century? With the help of Grandma Ketumati’s balm, these three “bad” people outwit  contemporary villains. 

In “Heart’s Desire”, an old woman seeks to  make a bargain with the devil, but the devil isn’t interested, and she finds herself stuck with two angels. She and the angels do their best, but the old woman learns that a happy end and heart’s desire are not synonymous.

And in “The Dream Book”, based on The Tempest, Caliban, Miranda, Prospero and the rest find that their dreams clash and lie there as pretty and pitiless as glass shards. Yet, each time they engage once again in this dangerous pursuit.

“She is a fabulist who is never preachy. A feminist who is never humourless. A poet who is never arcane. An intellectual who is never pedantic… Her work points to a deeply internalized radicalism, one that has as much depth as it has edge. Quirky, funny, intellectually agile, capable of making connections between the mundane and the metaphysical, adept at sniffing out the archetypal in the culturally particular, they point to a mind that is as engaged as it is engaging.“ — Arundhati Subramaniam

SUNITI NAMJOSHI is a poet, a fabulist and a children’s writer who has written over thirty books. After a stint in the Indian Administrative Service, Namjoshi moved to Canada where she earned a PhD at McGill University, and then moved on to doing what she loves best: writing. A selection of her writings is published in The Fabulous Feminist (Zubaan, 2012). Suki (Zubaan-Penguin, 2013), a memoir about her beloved cat is both a book about a relationship and an elegy. Her recent work, Foxy Aesop: On the Edge asks point-blank whether it is the function of writers to save the world.

Very little is known about Aesop who was supposed to have been a slave on the island of Samos in the sixth century BC. It is his fables (and those attributed to him) that have come down to us through the centuries.

In this version, a fabulist from the future, referred to as Sprite, hoicks herself back to his century. “Why didn’t you save the world?” That’s the Sprite’s cry. Aesop, meanwhile, is trying to save his skin, make up his fables and live his life. Given the pitfalls of human nature, are the fables an Instruction Manual for staying out of trouble? What about morals, what about reform, what about the castigation of social evils? Sprite nags and cajoles and begins to wonder how much power a writer really has. The book offers a virtuoso display of how the building blocks of a fable can be used in a variety of ways. It’s witty, it’s satirical and the Sprite herself is a comical figure. But at the end, when she has to return to her own time, that is to our own time and to our broken world, her central question suddenly seems less absurd, and far more urgent.

“Think of the vicious wit of Virginia Woolf, laced with the tender melancholia of Hélène Cixous, spiked with the subtle eroticism of Anaïs Nin.”
— Somak Ghoshal, Livemint

“Her writing is both wry and brave, rooted and uprooting. It is, in fact, as the title suggests fabulous writing.”
—Annie Zaidi, author of Gulab and Love Stories #1-14

“Namjoshi’s radicalism is not simply one of overturning structures, or of arguing for the recognition of women but, in the best practice of feminism, investigates, rethinks and revalues.”
—Robyn Cadwallader, Verity La

Suniti Namjoshi is a poet, a fabulist and a children’s writer who has written over thirty books. A selection of her writings is published in The Fabulous Feminist (Zubaan, 2012). Suki (Zubaan-Penguin, 2013), a memoir about her beloved cat is both a book about a relationship and an elegy. Her latest work, Foxy Aesop, asks point-blank whether it is the function of writers to save the world. She has recently completed a dramatic sequence, ‘The Dream Book,’ which is based on the dream imagery in The Tempest and is also concerned with saving the world – over and over and over again.

During the current COVID-19 surge we are shipping orders from Delhi once per week. Please allow 8-10 business days for delivery.

In Suki, fabulist Suniti Namjoshi weaves a delightful tapestry from threads of longing, loss, memory, metaphor, and contemplation. The whole picture is a stunning evocation of the love and friendship shared between S and her Super Cat, Suki, a lilac Burmese. Suki suggests that she could be a goddess, and S her high priestess. S declines, but as they discuss the merits of vegetarianism, or the meaning of happiness, or morality, or just daily life, it soon becomes clear that the bond between them is a deep and complex one. The days of Suki’s life are figured as leaves, which fall vividly but irrevocably into time’s stream and are recollected with a wild tenderness by the grieving S, who learns through the disciplines of meditation how to lose what is most loved.

This beautiful narrative, both memoir and elegy, offers solace and celebration to everyone who has felt the trust that passes between a person and a beloved creature.

It was on a sabbatical in England in the late seventies that Suniti Namjoshi discovered feminism – or rather, she discovered that other feminists existed, and many among them shared her thoughts and doubts, her questions and visions.

Since then, she has been writing – fables, poetry, prose autobiography, children’s stories – about power, about inequality, about oppression, effectively using the power of language and the literary tradition to expose what she finds absurd and unacceptable.

This new collection brings together in one volume a huge range of Namjoshi’s writings, starting with her classic collection, Feminist Fables, and coming right up to her latest work.

“Namjoshi is a fabulist who is never preachy. A feminist who is never humourless. A poet who is never arcane. An intellectual who is never pedantic… Her work points to a deeply internalized radicalism, one that has as much depth as it has edge. Quirky, funny, intellectually agile, capable of making connections between the mundane and the metaphysical, adept at sniffing out the archetypal in the culturally particular, they point to a mind that is as engaged as it is engaging.” — Arundhathi Subramaniam