Urvashi Butalia and Ritu Menon founded India’s first feminist publishing house, Kali For Women, in 1984. In 2003, they parted ways to start their own projects: Menon began Women Unlimited; Butalia founded Zubaan Books. Now, in a compressed and edited interview for Mint, Butalia discusses some of the challenges she faces in India’s publishing ecosystem, and also notes, “in my 40 years in publishing, things have never felt as exciting as they are now. It truly seems there are infinite possibilities.”
Urvashi Butalia on Indian Small Presses
The Cultural Logic of Margaret Atwood
Fredric Jameson reviews Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood for the London Review of Books.
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#history
“if you’re looking to sound clever, you could call it an ‘octothorpe’, the tongue-in-cheek term coined at Bell to describe it.” The history of hashtags, and other words that the Internet has given us.
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Blue Nights
An “extended short film excerpt” of Joan Didion reading from her memoir Blue Nights, which our own Michael Bourne reviewed yesterday.
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The Affirming Aspirations of Anthony Veasna So
Hamilton Cain examines the ghosts that haunt Afterparties, the beautifully crafted short story collection by the late Anthony Veasna So.
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Xerxes, Xystus, and Xanthippe
What did the letter X stand for before xylophones and x-rays? Past examples include historical figures, plants, and animals, all mostly of a Greek bent.
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