Reading New India: Post-Millennial Indian Fiction in English

“The splendor and the misery of Reading New India is that it whets the appetite for the fiction it introduces but necessarily fails to satiate the appetite thus awakened.” –Emily Coolidge Toker, LSE Review of Books

“A thoughtful look, laden with insight, at the ways in which a new India is being written and read.” –Namita Gokhale, Writer, publisher and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival

“Varughese’s book is a gift for academics teaching Indian writing in English. And perhaps it will outshine all other books in the ‘academic’ library with its lively and pulpy, Karan Joharesque cover of bright yellow and pink.” –Anubha Yadav, The Book Review India

“Reading New India provides a much needed and timely introduction to postmillennial India and Indian English literature within India as they move beyond the postcolonial past and forward into ‘Newness’.” –Ashwinee Pendharkar, Transnational Literature

“This is an ambitious and novel project, strenuous though, considering the vast body of literature to be considered. And [Dawson] has done it with a sense of academic objectivity. Reading New India: Post-Millennial Fiction in English – “the first book to focus on fiction at the millennium, the crossroad for India’s globalisation” – is not a critique or a collection of reviews of individual novels or a generalised assessment of the oeuvre of individual writers, but a representation of various trends, themes, motifs, lineaments, zeitgeist, dynamic & conflicting cultural mores & values informing the fiction in hand, and an analysis of the core themes of some of the individual typical novels written in different voices.” —The Hans India

Emma Dawson is Sessional English Lecturer at Keele University, UK. An experienced field researcher on world literature, she is author of Beyond the Postcolonial: World Englishes Literature (Palgrave, 2012) and editor of numerous anthologies of short stories from such countries as Cameroon, Uganda and Malaysia.