Blaft?

What is that strange noise? It's resonating all over this world. Where is it coming from? Blaft! The sounds of an alternate universe of creativity, dreams, eccentricity, and well...purple creatures:

What is Blaft? Blaft is an amazing new independent publishing house, based in Chennai, that successfully launched itself into the realm of exploratory literature and art, on 16^th May 2008. Don’t miss out on them. They present an array of unique and exclusive publications. If you want something new to read, you must pick up one of their books, all available on www.Amazon.com, www.landmarkonthenet.com, and all major bookstores in India, USA, and Canada. So, who started Blaft? Two extremely versatile, excited, and happy characters: Rashmi Ruth Devadasan lives a life of cinema, theatre, and writing. Her ideal world would be rows of bookshelves and DVDs She has worked with Director Gautam Menon since his first film Minnale, and is an active part of The Perch Collective. Kaveri Lalchand is an apparel manufacturer and exporter, and a fashion designer. She is passionate about theatre, dance, the culinary arts, travel, old buildings, meditation, people and books. What have they published? The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction selected & translated by Pritham Chakravarthy edited by Rakesh Khanna Cover illustration by Shyam Cover design by Malavika PC Mad scientists! Desperate housewives! Murderous robots! Scandalous starlets! Sordid, drug-fueled love affairs! This anthology features seventeen stories by ten best-selling authors of Tamil crime, romance, science fiction, and detective stories, none of them ever before translated into English, along with reproductions of wacky cover art and question-and-answer sessions with some of the authors. Grab a masala vadai, sit back and enjoy! List of authors: Suba; Rajesh Kumar; Vidya Subramaniam; Indra Soundar Rajan; Ramanichandran; Pattukkottai Prabakar; Tamizhvanan; Pushpa Thangadorai; Brajanand V.K.; Resakee Price: INDIA Rs 395/- US $17.95 India: Order from Landmark Bookstores Outside India: Pre-order from Amazon.com

Zero Degree by Charu Nivedita translated by Pritham K Chakravarthy edited by Rakesh Khanna Cover design and illustration by Malavika PC

With its mad patchwork of phone sex conversations, nightmarish torture scenes, tender love poems, numerology, mythology, and compulsive name-dropping of Latin American intellectuals, Charu Nivedita's novel Zero Degree stands out as a groundbreaking work of South Indian transgressive fiction that unflinchingly probes the deepest psychic wounds of humanity

Price: India Rs 315/ - US $9.99 India: Order from Landmark Bookstores Outside India: Pre-order from Amazon.com

when this key sketch gets real tongue is fork hen is cock when this key sketch gets real my baby eagle's dream comes true drawings by Natesh Chennai-based artist Natesh is perhaps better known for his installation artworks and colorful paintings, which have recently been exhibited in New Delhi. This collection of some seventy ink drawings of surreal combinations of hands, women, fish, tigers, eagles, and rhinoceroses showcases the amazing things Natesh can do with a simple black line.

Price: INDIA Rs 395/- US $17.95 Outside India: Pre-order from Amazon.com

Each book delves into strange, bizarre and brilliant worlds. This is a feast for the every reader’s mind. Blaft plans to keep growing and casting purple eyes on strange stories, dreams, and worlds. In future, they are planning on translations of fiction from various South Asian regions, English fiction, comic books, graphic novels, children's books, non-fiction, textbooks, how-to-manuals, encyclopaedias, and kitchen appliances, Wonder which world they may capture in their forthcoming publications.

Catch the Blafters on www.blaft.com 27 Lingam Complex, Dhandeeswaram Main Road, Velachery, Chennai 600 042. India. T: +91 98843 06144 / 98840 06145 Email: blaft@blaft.com

Still Life With Woodpecker

As a child I thought I would never read love stories, and I would grow up far from mushy romanticism. Years after certain blind assumptions, my luck turned to be brilliant with a handful of carefully selected love stories. The journey started with Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood and Wind-up Bird Chronicle. This week, I read Still Life With Woodpecker (1980) by Tom Robbins. It explores love in very unique and exquisite ways. Robbins writes the story of a princess, Leigh-Cheri, and an outlaw, Bernard Mickey Wrangle. This a revolutionary post-modern fairy tale of dynamites and saving the world. Still Life With Woodpecker talks of some strange relationships of the writer and his Remington SL3, of Woodpecker and his dynamites, of Guiletta and her toot, of Camel Cigarettes and solitude, of Princess and her Prince Charming, of European Royalty and America, and of love and its Moon. The narrative urges the reader to watch the Moon, learn childhood, listen to fairy tales carefully, observe objects, and delve in solitude. The writing is dynamic and runs in express speed. It separates the narrative, writer, typewriter, reader, and characters on different planes, but manages to place them in the same chamber of thought. This is beautiful, eccentric, and something everyone should read. Who is an outlaw? What is the basis of social activism? Who are the Redheads? What is importance of the Moon? The book keeps on asking questions, searching in the depths of life and thought. It bursts like dynamite lit up in a dark little chamber. The pages fly. It struggles to discover, what makes love stay. *Cover design - Leslie W. LePere **Click cover to Buy at Amazon.com

The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor

Often when a writer travels, interviews and by life gets to a know a lot of people, he/she goes through much trouble to unearth privacy, stories that don't really belong to them. Yet again, that is the job of writer, mainly a journalist - making another's story a creation of their own intellect. The triumph to stay alive, the implications of heroism, the social set up of Columbia under the military and social dictatorship of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, run a seam across the story-line of "The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor," by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The narrative stands alone to talk about the wavy depth of the story telling talents both that the protagonist and Marquez have acquired through the years. This book, particularly, is a different and unique publication by Marquez. It is a typical journalistic reconstruction, like many of his other creations like "Of Love and Other Demons," but these pages are thoroughly filled with the view Luis Alejandro Velasco.

Marquez, the famous magical realist, with in-depth understanding of realism needed for courageous jounalism, reconstructs a narrative, publishes it, but warns us that he was pretty much persuaded to lay it on the shelves for sale.

The most intriguing aspect of this author is that he will never fail to tell you from which incident and from what understanding of realism, did the narrative bloom.Nothing puts his magic in words, other than his own, where he writes an abstract for this 'reconstruction' - "The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor who drifted on a life raft for ten days without food or water, was proclaimed a national hero, kissed by beauty queens, made rich through publicity, and then spurned by the government and forgotten for all time."

Marquez has a passion for magic, and writes poetic prose. Much noteworthy claim goes to the translators of his writing. This book has been translated from Spanish by Randolph Hogan. The translator needs credit for keeping alive a writer in a different language, a different system, with the same magic.Penguin Publishers sell this book globally, at reasonable rates. In India, one can get a legal copy for Rs. 170.