Word!

Summer Reading Suggestions*

Tan to Tamarind: Poems About the Color Brown, Malathi Michelle Iyengar, Children's Book Press

When you look in the mirror, what do you see? Tan, sienna, topaz, or tamarind? Oh how lovely all the shades of brown are…from swirls of henna on ocher hands to cinnamon lips smiling over a cup of cafe con leche. That's what I love about this book “ how it engages everyday moments with talk of race and our connection to each other and the world around us. Poet Malathi Michelle Iyengar sees a whole spectrum of beautiful shades of brown, along with Jamel Akib's pastel illustrations, this warm and inviting poetry collection helps young readers discover that no matter what your skin tone, every shade is beautiful.

Codes of Misconduct: Regulating Prostitution in Late Colonial Bombay, Ashwini Tambe, University of Minnesota Press

Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, legislators in Bombay passed a series of repetitive laws seeking to control prostitution. During the same time, Bombay’s sex industry grew vast in scale. Toronto author and academic, Ashwini Tambe, explores why these remarkably similar laws failed to achieve their goal and questions the actual purpose of such lawmaking. She challenges linear readings of how laws create effects and demonstrates that the regulation and criminalization of prostitution were not contrasting approaches to prostitution but different modes of state coercion. By analyzing legal prohibitions as productive forces, she also probes the pornographic imagination of the colonial state, showing how regulations made sexual commerce more visible but rendered the prostitute silent.

Broken Road by A.E.W. Mason A.E.W. Mason's The Broken Road is the fourth novel in the 'Lesser-known Raj Fiction' series edited by Ralph Crane. A gripping adventure romance of the Frontier first published in 1907, The Broken Road tells of the building of the Road, and, through the relationship between the two main characters, Dick Linforth, scion of a family of Empire-builders, and Shere Ali, the Prince of Chiltistan, compellingly explores the sense of duty that drove successive generations of British men to sacrifice their lives to the goals of Empire, and the contentious issue of educating Indian princes in England. While undoubtedly reinscribing the image of a confident and secure empire characteristic of much Raj fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the novel also offers unusual insights into the human cost-on both sides of the racial divide-of producing that image, making it of significant interest to readers interested in colonial and postcolonial literatures, as well as general readers. This new, critical edition of The Broken Road, which includes a detailed introduction, a chronology of A.E.W. Mason's life, maps, and extensive explanatory notes, makes available a fascinating work of Raj fiction.

*Courtesy of the DesiLit Chapter of Toronto

In the Kitchen - - by Monica Ali

Monica Ali, nominated for the Man Booker Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, has written a follow-up to Brick Lane that will further establish her as one of England's most compelling and original voices.

Gabriel Lightfoot is an enterprising man from a northern England mill town, making good in London. As executive chef at the once-splendid Imperial Hotel, he is trying to run a tight kitchen. But his integrity, to say nothing of his sanity, is under constant challenge from the competing demands of an exuberant multinational staff, a gimlet-eyed hotel management, and business partners with whom he is secretly planning a move to a restaurant of his own. Despite the pressures, all his hard work looks set to pay off.

Until a worker is found dead in the kitchen's basement. It is a small death, a lonely death -- but it is enough to disturb the tenuous balance of Gabe's life.

Elsewhere, Gabriel faces other complications. His father is dying of cancer, his girlfriend wants more from their relationship, and the restaurant manager appears to be running an illegal business under Gabe's nose.

Enter Lena, an eerily attractive young woman with mysterious ties to the dead man. Under her spell, Gabe makes a decision, the consequences of which strip him naked and change the course of the life he knows -- and the future he thought he wanted.

Readers and reviewers have been stunned by the breadth of humanity in Monica Ali's fiction. She is compared to Dickens and called one of three British novelists who are "the voice of a generation" by Time magazine. In the Kitchen is utterly contemporary yet has all the drama and heartbreak of a great nineteenth-century novel. Ali is sheer pleasure to read, a truly magnificent writer.