Jaya’s Newsletter 4 (19 November 2016)
Hello!
(L-R) Carolyn Reidy, Simon & Schuster Inc., Jaya Bhattacharji Rose and Rahul Srivastava, MD, S&S India
The business of publishing continues to be fascinating. Simon & Schuster India celebrated its 5th year and announced its inaugural list at a wonderful reception attended by prominent publishing professionals. Authors on the list include Natasha Badhwar, Jairam Ramesh, Keki Daruwalla, Samanth Subramanian , Prayaag Akbar , Jagdeep Chokhar, Priyanka Dubey, Paddy Rangappa et al. Fascinatingly local authors signed by the Indian office will be offered a global platform. Meanwhile in USA, AmazonCrossing, Amazon’s publishing imprint which focuses on translations, continues to surpass all other publishers in the number of titles it’s doing per year. Their target is to publish between 60-100 titles / year. This emphasis on making world literature visible especially through translations is bound to have a significant impact on global publishing.
Award-winning publisher Seagull Books’s Correspondence by Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann and translated by 
Wieland Hoban has been turned into a critically acclaimed film. Paul Celan (1920-70) is one of the best-known German poets of the Holocaust; many of his poems, admired for their spare, precise diction, deal directly with its stark themes. Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-73) is recognized as one of post-World War II German literature’s most important novelists, poets, and playwrights.
The 2016 National Book Award winners were announced with Colson Whitehead winning the fiction category for The Underground Railroad.
The dates for the Jeffrey Archer book tour to launch the final volume of Clifton Chronicles have been announced:
21 Nov – 7pm at Amphitheater, Cyberhub, Gurugram
22 Nov – 7 pm at Amphitheater, VR Bengaluru, Bengaluru
23 Nov – 7pm at Crossword bookstore, Phoenix Market City, Pune
24 Nov – 6pm at Crossword Bookstore, Kemps Corner, Mumbai
Entry is free. It is on first come first serve basis.
Jaya Recommends
- On financial literacy: Ron Lieber’s full of wisdom and excellent tips The Opposite of
Spoiled: Raising Kids Who are Grounded, Generous, And Smart About Money is a must. So is the Rupaiya-Paisa series by Mala Kumar ( Pratham Books). 
Simon Morrison’s Bolshoi Confidential which is an account of the 240 year old Bolshoi Ballet- Fazlur Rahman’s memoir about growing up in East Pakistan / Bangladesh before moving to USA to become a haematologist-oncologist The Temple Road: A Doctor’s Journey ( Speaking Tiger)
- Birds of India by Bikram Grewal – beautifully illustrated handy encyclopaedia of the birds of the Indian subcontinent. ( Om Books)
- A wonderful article by Prathap Nair in the Caravan Magazine on Hitler’s Mein Kampf whose scholarly and heavily annotated edition published in Jan 2016 has already sold more than 85,000 copies.
- An interview with Zadie Smith on Male Critics, Appropriation, and What Interests Her Novelistically About Trump
- George Takei on the Japanese internment camps in America during WWII, also the focus of Isabel Allende’s brilliant novel, The Japanese Lover ( Simon & Schuster).
- Here’s a sari and a mango: an investigation on South Asian book covers
New arrivals
- Namita Gokhale Things to Leave Behind
- Tarini Bedi Dashing ladies of Shiv Sena ( Aleph)
- Gopalkrishna Gandhi Abolishing the Death Penalty: Why India Should Say No to Capital Punishment (Aleph)
- Bertil Falk Feroze: The Forgotten Gandhi ( Roli Books)
- Robert Twigger White Mountain: Real and Imagined Journeys in the Himalayas ( Hachette)
- J. K. Rowling Fantastic Beasts and where to find them: The Original Screenplay ( Little, Brown)
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