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Redemption Rain

Engaging with a broad range of human experience and concerns, Redemption Rain invites the reader into its profound epiphanies through patient revisitation and introspection. Jennifer Rahim’s voice weaves the explosive power of her lively Trinidadian Creole with the searching intensity of one given to appreciating memory’s redemptive light. This is a book about the necessary and the unexpected; about costly arrival in the sacred spaces of realization and recognition. Always the impulse is to praise. Hers is a voice that does not shrill but invests in the finer sensibilities of justice, beauty, love, and community to bring out her poetic truth.

"Redemption Rain provides a tenderly perceptive yet penetratingly measured depiction of the contemplative’s path on which spirituality, history, culture, and ecology congregate in unambiguous communal celebration. . . Here then is a poetry that speaks directly to our sense of human belonging, our recognition of smallness within vastness, our experiential encounters with love and loss." — S Rose-Ann Walker, The University of Trinidad and Tobago

About the Author

Jennifer Rahim is the author of three volumes of poetry, Mothers Are Not the Only Linguists (1992), Between the Fence and the Forest (2002), and Approaching Sabbaths (2009), and a collection of short stories, Songster and Other Stories (2007). Approaching Sabbaths was awarded the 2010 Casa de las Américas Prize for best book in the category Caribbean Literature in English or Creole. Rahim is a senior lecturer in literature at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago.

You Cannot Turn Away: Poems by R. Cheran translated by Chelva Kanaganayakam

This book provides, for the first time, a bilingual edition ( both in Tamil and English) of forty poems by R. Cheran. Written over a period of three decades, the poems cover a range of experiences, including love, war, despair, hope and diaspora.

Cheran is considered one of the finest contemporary poets in Tamil and his poetry is read widely in North America, Europe  and South Asia. Both modernist and unfailingly lyrical, his work is a remarkable blend of tradition and innovation.

The forty poems in this volume have been translated and introduced by Chelva Kanaganayakam.

About The Author 

R. Cheran is currently an associate professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminology at the University of Windsor. His publications include History and Imagination: Tamil Culture in the Global Context (2007), New Demarcations: Essays in Tamil Studies (2009), Pathways of Dissent: Tamil Nationalism in Sri Lanka (2010), and Empowering Diasporas: Dynamics of Post War Tamil Transnational Politics (2011).

About Chelva Kanaganayakam

Chelva, is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto and is also the Director for the Centre for South Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. His major publications include Moveable Margins: The Shifting Spaces of Canadian Literature (2005), Counterrealism and Indo Anglian Fiction (2002), Lutesong and Lament: Tamil Writing from Sri Lanka (2001), Dark Antonyms and Paradise: The Poetry of Rienzi Crusz (1997), Configurations of Exile: South Asian Writers and Their World (1995), and Structures of Negation: The Writings of Zulfikar Ghose (1993).

This book will be featured at the TSAR Fall Book Launch November 22, 2011. Click HERE for more details on this event.

Lingering Tide and Other Stories by Latha Viswanathan

These poignant stories finely depict the lives of immigrants, through the themes of family adjustment, loss and starting afresh in a new place.

Set in suburban Toronto, New Jersey, Texas and India, they draw out the conflicts in three generations of Indians whose lives interconnect even as they straddle the old and the new. What we sense is both the anguish of loss and the thrill of discovery. Viswanathan's quiet prose imparts powerful emotions that ring true and her rendering of cultural clash is truly skilful and nuanced.

The depiction of her characters’ interior lives is so full and vital that they breathe and walk off the page. The reader is drawn in and completely absorbed into her world of transitions.

“Whether she is writing about North America or India, a middle aged musician or a young boy, Latha Viswanathan's prose is unfailingly vivid, tender and intelligent, full of sensual details and pungent insights.Lingering Tide is a lovely, generous collection.”
—Margot Livesey, Author of Criminals

“Viswanathan writes so incisively and so intensely and so beautifully about what she refers to as this life, this moment, that readers owe her a debt almost even before they have read a single word. Her stories focus with lazer-like intensity on our shape-shifting culture and, as they do so, define it.”
—Alan Cheuse, Author of The Grandmother's Club

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Latha Viswanathan has worked as a journalist, copywriter, editor and teacher in India, London, Manila, Montreal, Toronto and the United States. These stories have appeared in major American literary magazines and won awards. Her work received a grant from the Texas Commission of the Arts in Fiction, was published in Best New Stories from the South and broadcast on National Public Radio. She currently lives and writes in Houston.

This book is featured on the TSAR Fall Book Launch.  Click HERE to see details of this event!

 

Love Cake

In these poems, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores how queer people of colour resist and transform violence through love and desire. Remembering and testifying about the damage caused by the racial profiling of South Asian and Arab people post 9/11, border crossings and internal and external wars in Sri Lanka and the diaspora, Love Cake also documents the persistence of survival and beauty—especially the dangerous beauty found in queer people of colour loving and desiring. Love Cake maps the joys and challenges of reclaiming the body and sexuality after violence, examining a family history of violence with compassion and celebrating the resilient, specific ways we create new families, take our bodies back, love, fight, and transform violence.

“Only Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha could concoct the secret recipe for Love Cake. One layer of escaped working class girl from Worcester, MA; one layer of long lost Tamil woman returning to her Sri Lankan roots; sweet cream of sexy queer femme on top; unexpected bite into her bittersweet love & trouble triumph healing rebellion. No one knows quite how she makes it; just that we can’t get enough.”

—Aya De Leon, Director June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, UC Berkeley

“Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's Love Cake is a book I want to carry with me when I need to remember my body, to remember our ancestors, to rebuild home. Leah's poems are rebel songs and love songs that bear witness and fight back. Love Cake is as miraculous, as mean, as stunning as every queer brown girl who survives.”

—Qwo-Li Driskill, author of Walking with Ghosts: Poems

About the Author

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a Worcester-raised, Toronto-matured, Oakland-based queer Sri Lankan writer, performer, and teacher. She is the co-founder and co-artistic director of Mangos With Chili, North America’s only touring cabaret of queer and trans people of colour performing artists. She is a commissioned performer with Sins Invalid, the national performance organization of queer people with disabilities and chronic illnesses. Her onewoman show, Grown Woman Show, has toured throughout North America. The author of Consensual Genocide, her writing has appeared in numerous anthologies. She writes regularly for Bitch, Colorlines, Hyphen, Left Turn and Make/Shift magazines. She is one of Feminist Press’s 2010 “40 Feminists Under 40 Who Are Shaping the Future” and a 2011 Pushcart Prize nominee.

Man Asian literary prize announces longlist

The Tolstoys, Hugos and Eliots of today are to be found not in Europe but in Asia, according to the chair of directors of the Man Asian literary prize. Announcing the longlist for this year's $30,000 (£19,000) award for the best novel by an Asian writer, which ranges from Japan to India and Iran to South Korea, Professor David Parker from the Chinese University of Hong Kong said that "if we are looking for books of the epic scale and stature of the great European 19th-century novels, we must turn to Asia".

Pointing to the Man Asian longlist inclusion of both Haruki Murakami's "massive magnum opus" 1Q84 and Amitav Ghosh's three-volume epic about the opium wars, of which River of Smoke is the second volume, Parker said that Asia is producing novels of "a scale and ambition we don't often see in western writing these days.

"Could it be that as the world's economic centre of gravity is moving eastwards, so too is its artistic energy and ambition?" he asked.

Five novels from India have been nominated for this year's Man Asian award: doctor and author Jahnavi Barua's Rebirth, about a pregnant young woman in an uncertain marriage; cricket journalist Rahul Bhattacharya's The Sly Company of People Who Care, in which a journalist travels to Guyana; Ghosh's River of Smoke; Anuradha Roy's tale of a teacher in the remote Himalaya The Folded Earth; and Tarun J Tejpal's exploration of the pathologies of power, purity and dogma The Valley of Masks.

There are two longlisted titles from Japan, Murakami's epic love story 1Q84 and Banana Yoshimoto's The Lake, in which a young woman moves to Tokyo to become a graphic artist following the death of her mother. Censored in China, Yan Lianke makes the running for Dream of Ding Village, an account of a blood-selling scandal in contemporary China, with the longlist completed by debut Pakistani author Jamil Ahmad's The Wandering Falcon, acclaimed Bangladeshi novelist Tahmima Anam's The Good Muslim, prominent Iranian writer Mahmoud Dowlatabadi's The Colonel and award-winning South Korean novelist Kyung-sook Shin's Please Look After Mom.

Razia Iqbal, BBC correspondent and chair of the judging panel, said the longlist provides "the epic as well as the quotidian, the established writers as well as some on the cusp of greater success". Together with her fellow judges, the authors Chang-rae Lee and Vikas Swarup, she picked the 12 titles from 90 submitted novels. The books are connected, she said, by "a thing that happens when we read good fiction: the cumulative impact of sentence after good sentence is transforming for the reader. So, while it is hoped that the list reflects among the best of what is coming out of Asia, it also presents Asia to itself, an equally important mirror to hold up."

The announcement of the titles in the running for the Man Asian prize, which will be awarded on 15 March 2012, follows the unveiling of the six books in the running for the DSC prize for South Asian literature. Worth $50,000 (£31,000), the award is for the best writing about the South Asian region by an author from anywhere in the world and is also dominated by Indian writers, with Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka the only non-Indian writer on the shortlist. Indian authors UR Ananthamurthy, Chandrakanta, Usha KR, Tabish Khair and Kavery Nambisan complete the line-up for the DSC award, the winner of which will be announced on 21 January.

This article first appeared HERE.