Tabish Khair Livres

"The 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. In 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? In 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. "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. By 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"-- Provided by publisher

A t first glance, Jamilla and Ameena couldn't be more different. Both are Yorkshire-born teenage girls of South Asian descent; but whereas Jamilla lives with her conservative Muslim family and is quiet, religious and academically bright, the more worldly Ameena masks her insecurity behind a brassy, bawdy persona and lives with her divorced mum.

CAN THE GLASS EVER REALLY BE MORE THAN HALF-FULL? A young Pakistani academic relives his days sharing a cramped apartment in Aarhus, Denmark, with two unlikely bedfellows. They are Ravi, his incorrigible best friend and a wry observer of the human condition; and Karim, their fundamentalist Muslim landlord, whose apparent double life soon intrigues his tenants. While Ravi finds his jaded world outlook challenged when he falls for an unlikely Danish girl, and our narrator embarks upon a complicated love affair of his own, Karim's bizarre and secretive behaviour leads to creeping suspicions that something might, indeed, be rotten in the state of Denmark . . . By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position is a sparkling account of strangers in strange lands, told with wit and humanity.

Set in the pre-Bollywood era, this dark and twisted novel delves into the complexities of the Indian film industry. It explores the lives of characters entangled in ambition, betrayal, and the pursuit of fame, revealing the gritty realities behind the glamorous facade. Through its vivid storytelling, the book captures the struggles and moral dilemmas faced by those striving for success in a cutthroat environment, offering a poignant commentary on the nature of art and ambition.

"Harris Maloub, a killer with an erased official past, now in his fifties, is visited by someone who could not be alive and given an assignment. In Aarhus, Denmark, Jens Erik, police officer on pre-retirement leave, somehow cannot forget the body of a Black man recovered from the sea some years ago. On an abandoned oil rig in the North Sea, turned into a resort for the very rich, Michelle, a young Caribbean woman, realizes that the man she has followed to this job is not what he claims to be. And neither is the rig, where a secret laboratory bares to her a face that is neither human nor animal. Behind all this, there lurks the ghost of a seminar in 2007: most of the participants of that seminar are dead or untraceable. Why was their obscure research on plants and fungi and microbes so important? What is the secret that killed them? What is the weapon that powerful syndicates are trying to obtain - or develop? Narrated from the perspective of the post-pandemic world around 2030, but moving back in time to cover all of the 21st century, and even bits and pieces from the 20th and the 19th, The Body by the Shore is a novel of suspense and speculation about the complexity of life and intricacy of the earth. It is also a novel about reason and emotion, love and despair, greed and hope, human beings and microbes. When the narrative strands come together, a world of great terror and beauty is revealed to the reader"-- Provided by publisher

Tabish Khair makes the provocative argument that literature is an agnostic mode of thinking about language, reality, and their relationship to each other that can be an antidote to fundamentalism. The book concludes with an impassioned 'call to literature' as a means of remedying the current crisis in the humanities.