In which Namita Gokhale’s selects her top reads for 2011 and includes three Zubaan Titles

We’re extremely delighted to find three of our titles featured in Namita Gokhale’s list of Best titles of 2011. For Zubaan, this comes close on the heels of Venus Flytrap, Zubaan’s anthology of women’s erotica, being listed in at least five publications as one of the significant books to look forward to in 2012. Clearly we’re doing something right. However, it isn’t complete until you read the precious titles that we put out on the shelves. These are the three books in Namita Gokhale’s list.

A Terrible Matriarchy By Easterine Iralu

It’s the coming of age story of a Naga childhood, situated in both internal and social strife. Documenting a society in transition, it evokes the spirits of time and place, of births and deaths and passings. Iralu’s writing has the quality of pared down simplicity, with an aftertaste of hurt and irony. “For some days after Vimenuo’s father’s death, people could speak of nothing else. There were stories of people who saw him on their way back from the fields in the late evening. They said he appeared to them near the stream on the way home, his face turned away from them. But of course they knew it was him immediately; he wore the checked flannel shirt that was his favourite when he was alive.”

Buy your copy on Flipkart by clicking here

The Bad Boys Guide to the Good Indian GirlBy Annie Zaidi and Smriti Ravindra

Aka the Good Indian Girl’s Guide to Living, Loving and Having Fun, this delightful book actually covers much more serious territory than the unsuspecting reader might first deduce. The “Good Indian Girl” is the subject of much Bharatiya and diasporic angst. Dedicated to “All Indian Girls: Good, bad, ugly, little, perfect, plump, married, dead”, this tour de force goes through the complex territory of sex, virginity and sacrifices in the name of family, culture and nation. As the authors elucidate, “You can access a kind of default nationalism through the simple process of not having any fun…”

Buy your copy on Flipkart by clicking here

A Street in Srinagar By Chandrakanta

The book has been effectively translated by Manisha Chaudhury from the original Hindi. The shadows of violence loom over Ailan Gali, a street in Kashmir where the houses are stacked against each other in shoulder rubbing intimacy. These multiple tales of memory and transition, of migration, modernity and exile hold together a novel which invokes the sounds and smells of a place the Pandit community once called home.

A Street in Srinagar has also been shortlisted for the DSC Prize to be announced at the Jaipur Literature Festival!

Buy your copy on Flipkart by clicking here