Literature Against Fundamentalism (The Literary Agenda)

Literature & Fiction

Khair, Tabish

History & Criticism

Oxford University Press

The Bus Stopped

Macmillan, UK

A very angry bus driver, abandoned by his wife and going nowhere in his career; a sanctimonious conductor; a nervous, half-Indian businessman clutching a briefcase full of cash; a right-wing Hindu matriarch; a young boy returning to his village after robbing his employer. They all meet€”and witness a tragic event€”only because they are all travelling on the same bus, in the same direction, on the same day. With exceptional poise and beguiling simplicity, Khair introduces a range of voices, thoughts, ideas and identities, allowing each individual's story to unfold gradually.

Filming: A Love Story

Set primarily in India and spanning the 20th century, 'Filming' tells a series of stories, including that of one-time prostitute Durga, who is persuaded to give away her young son Ashok, and that of Saleem, the son of a prostitute and two-times star of the silver screen.

Literary

Picador

A series of stories set primarily in India and spanning the 20th century, this collection includes the tale of one-time prostitute, Durga, who is persuaded to give away her young son, Ashok, and that of Saleem, the son of a prostitute and star of the silver screen. As these stories—narrated by a writer who relates the details of other people's lives but is evasive about his own—combine, they create a novel that is simultaneously about the small, minute details of life and the larger, arcing themes of humanity. Weaving together major historical events—including the Partition of India, the assassination of Gandhi, the rise of photography and the Bombay film industry, and the development of barbed wire—with the everyday moments that make up the main fabric of our lives, Filming is both ambitious in its scope and impressive in its execution.

Pan/Macmillan

A subversive, macabre novel of a young Indian man’s misadventures in Victorian London as the city is racked by a series of murders In a small Bihari village, Captain William T. Meadows finds just the man to further his phrenological research back home: Amir Ali, confessed member of the infamous Thugee cult. With tales of a murderous youth redeemed, Ali gains passage to England, his villainously shaped skull there to be studied. Only Ali knows just how embroidered his story is, so when a killer begins depriving London’s underclass of their heads, suspicion naturally falls on the ";thug."; With help from fellow immigrants led by a shrewd Punjabi woman, Ali journeys deep into a hostile city in an attempt to save himself and end the gruesome murders. Ranging from skull-lined mansions to underground tunnels a ghostly people call home, The Thing about Thugs is a feat of imagination to rival Wilkie Collins or Michael Chabon. Short-liste

The Thing About Thugs

United States

Mariner Books

A novel about friendship, faith, and alienation, Just Another Jihadi Jane tells the tale of Islamist radicalization from the inside. Two children of Muslim immigrants in England's industrial north--thoughtful Jamilla and rebellious Ameena--become best friends, and find in religion and social media a community as welcoming and encouraging as their public education is estranging. After Jamilla's father dies and her brother marries, the two girls leave England and join the Islamist cause in Syria. The intellectual and emotional poverty as well as the violence they find there creates a story as gripping as it is heart-wrenching. As did All Quiet on the Western Front, Tabish Khair's novel reminds a new generation that heroism and sacrifice are not limited to one side in a conflict, and that the first victims of a murderous regime are those who live within it.

Just Another Jihadi Jane

INTERLINK+BOOKS

How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position: A Novel

Humor & Satire

A hilarious, satirical novel from award-winning Indian writer Tabish Khair Funny and sad, satirical and humane, this novel tells the interlinked stories of three unforgettable men whose trajectories cross in Denmark: the flamboyant Ravi, the fundamentalist Karim, and the unnamed and pragmatic Pakistani narrator. As the unnamed narrator copes with his divorce, and Ravi despite his exterior of skeptical flamboyance falls deeply in love with a beautiful woman who is incapable of responding in kind, Karim, their landlord, goes on with his job as a taxi driver and his regular Friday Qur an sessions. But is he going on with something else? Who is Karim? And why does he disappear suddenly at times or receive mysterious phone calls? When a terrorist attack takes place in town, all three men find themselves embroiled in doubt, suspicion, and, perhaps, danger. In his novel set in contemporary times in the west, Khair combines generic elements from the crime thriller, the immigrant novel, the campus novel, and the young adult romance to comment deeply and movingly on our lives today. It is a gripping novel full of suspense, humor, love and unforgettable characters. An acerbic commentary on the times, How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position is also a bitter-sweet, spell-binding novel about love and life today.

A collection of other stories from shining India—those not often told.\nThe short story “Namaste Trump” starts in a deceptive domestic setting, where a servant from the hinterlands is patronized and exploited by an upwardly mobile urban family. But as the nation celebrates Trump’s visit and copes with the pandemic, it ends up becoming a prophecy of endless haunting. This sets the agenda for a series of stories that delve into fracturing or broken lives in small-town India over the past fifty years.\nIn the novella-length “Night of Happiness,” pragmatic entrepreneur Anil Mehrotra has set up his thriving business empire with the help of his lieutenant, Ahmed, an older man who is different in more ways than one. Quiet and undemanding, Ahmed talks in aphorisms; bothers no one; and always gets the job done. But when one stormy night, Mehrotra discovers an aspect to Ahmed that defies all reason, he is forced to find out more about his trusted aide. What will he discover: madness or something worse?\nIn a series of three linked stories, “The Corridor,” “The Ubiquity of Riots” and “Elopement,” Khair traces, through the eyes of an adolescent, the tensions of living as a liberal Muslim in India in the 1970s and 1980s, tensions that isolate families, break friendships, and point to the violence to come. The narrator of these stories, now a busy professional, returns in the third person in another story, “Olden Friends are Golden,” about belonging and exclusion on WhatsApp. Then there is “Scam,” a flippantly narrated story about a crime that 
can only be comprehended as a scam perpetuated by the victim, and in “Shadow of a Story” violence returns to a village family in an unimaginable shape.\n“The Thing with Feathers” is perhaps about hope, but it is hope beyond despair, hope perhaps gone mad: or, is all hope mad now? Finally, “The Last Installment” narrates two farmers, a father and a son, in a village of North India, caught in a corporate vice: the breathless sentences of the story making the reader sense the desperation of the central character as he finally fights to breathe, to live.\nBy turns poetic, chilling, and heartbreaking, ranging from understated realism to gothic terror, this is a book of stories about precarious lives in a world without tolerance.\nPraise for Tabish Khair\n“Ingenious and mischievous …” 
– The New Yorker\n“Khair writes brilliantly ... Unmissable …” 
– The Times\n“Irreverent, intelligent, and explosive.” 
– The Independent\n“For a book so concise and witty, it is also surprisingly textured …” 
– The New Republic\n“The picture that emerges may sear your soul much like your all-time favorite film.” 
– India Today\n“Intelligent and argumentative …” 
– London Review of Books

Namaste Trump and Other Stories

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Khair, Tabish. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Khair, Tabish

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Khair, Tabish. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Literature Against Fundamentalism (The Literary Agenda)

The Bus Stopped

The Bus Stopped

Filming: A Love Story

Filming: A Love Story

The Thing About Thugs

Just Another Jihadi Jane

How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position: A Novel

How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position: A Novel

Namaste Trump and Other Stories