This is the almost final cover design for the Penguin India edition of VENGEANCE OF RAVANA: Book 7 of The Ramayana. I’m posting it here along with some good news. The first is that I have finally resolved the textual issues I had with the manuscripts of VoR and SoS and as a result I’ve finally (finally-finally-finally!) decided that both books ought to be published. This means that the series will end at eight books, not six or seven, and that I have finally been able to deal with the Sita banishment issue in a manner with which I feel satisfied. It’s only taken me six years – which is longer than it took me to write the first six books in the series! But it’s done. VoR will be released in a mass market edition by Penguin in a few months, followed within three months by the mass market edition of SoS. I’ll confirm publication dates once Penguin informs me of the same.

For those of you – “you few, you happy few!” – who’ve bought and read the exclusive limited signed AKB BOOKS edition of VoR and have ordered the exclusive limited signed AKB BOOKS edition of SoS, this may not be reason to jump up and down, which is bad for your joints anyway. But for the vast majority of Ramayana Series readers out there, I’m sure you will be happy to see why I chose to rescind my own earlier decision to end the series at six books and chose to continue it in these two additional volumes. I can’t promise that the answers I provide in these two books will please everyone. Indeed, they may please no one. Because the point of writing these books is not to please or displease, it’s simply to complete the mental journey I embarked upon when I began writing Prince of Ayodhya and finished that first book way back in the year 2000, long before any publisher was willing to even look at such a manuscript, let alone publish it. Today, I have journalists, readers, editors, booksellers, publishers and others who keep writing to me and telling me that I’m responsible for a wave of resurgence in Indian mythology. I really don’t give a damn about any resurgence or the commercial ramifications of making mythology “cool” as one editor put it. What I do care about is the wealth of great Indian literature that has been ignored by the world for so long in favour of other mythologies and legends of the western hemisphere and that deserves a wider readership and exposure.

As I’ve always said to anyone who praised me for the series: This is not about me. It’s not my story alone. It’s our story. Our history in fact. I’m proud and happy to have been the one to retell it in my humble and flawed attempt. But I’m not anyone special or talented for having done it, just a product of a great culture and people that share one of the world’s finest storytelling traditions. In my opinion, the finest.

One of the best television series currently on air, perhaps even the best television series ever. Does that sound like high praise? Well, it’s not meant to sound competitive – there are other shows that are also the best in their own way. Breaking Bad is excellent too, if a bit downbeat and often downright [...]

Courtesy of designer Pinaki De and Editor Saugata Mukherjee, here are two sneak peaks of the almost-final cover design of the Harper edition of SLAYER OF KAMSA: Book 1 of The Krishna Coriolis, published by HarperCollins India. It will be available in all Indian bookstores in September. If you want the AKB Books Signed Limited [...]

Update: Corrected from 5 to 4 titles based on availability. Just a reminder to use the AKB Books Request Form to book your limited signed copies of the above titles. This particular list of my next 4 titles will stay online until 31st August 2010. After that, a new list will be put up which [...]

The car radio was tuned to 107.1 FM. The song playing was How Much Is That Doggie In The Window? (The line “you can’t take a goldfish for a walk” is from the same song.) The song after that was The Butterfly and The Dog, which I’m not familiar with but was nice too. I [...]

When any commercial publishing category or genre becomes as ubiquitous as the word ubiquitous itself, it’s time to deal it a swift kick-in-the-nuts send-up. What better way to do it than by satirizing the work itself? This being the year, if not the millennium of the post-apocalyptic epic EOW (End of World) thriller, it’s a [...]

And, coming close on the heels of the glowing praise from Chiki Sarkar of Random House India after completing work on my first major non-fiction book The Valmiki Syndrome, here’s another outpouring of compliments from Saugata Mukherjee, my editor at HarperCollins India who will be publishing SLAYER OF KAMSA: Book 1 of The Krishna Coriolis, [...]

It’s often easy to slot people by their professions, and to slot those professions into narrow pigeon-holes of assumptive cliche. Publishing is one such profession which you’d rarely associate with things like sex scandals, corruption, financial theft, fraud, and the like. Yet, these things are more common than you may think even in the hallowed [...]

The above came to me with gifts of free books, including a lovely limited edition hardcover of a Murakami novel, from my Editor at Random House India, Chiki Sarkar, on completion of the editing of my first major non-fiction book The Valmiki Syndrome. I guess this means she likes it! Dear Ashok, A small gift [...]

As with the last update on 11th June, those of you who’ve been keeping tabs on the right-hand News & Updates column may not find many surprises here. But there was one important announcement that wasn’t in that last update and a couple of minor ones, so here goes… Waiting eagerly for my next books? [...]

Author Susan Orlean’s Free Range column in The New Yorker this week is about her experiences with changing editors on her first book. I wasn’t surprised to see how similar it was to my own experience – albeit on a much lesser scale. (I only went through about five editors, not the full alphabet like [...]

Pouring here in Mumbai. Our driver’s gone to his home town to see to his mother who is seriously ill, possibly terminal. So I’m the designated morning driver for my wife and daughter, neither of whom drive even though they have their own cars. My son drives himself in his own car but he sleeps [...]

This is an earlier post (from May) which I’m reproducing here as this is going to be my next major publication after TEN KINGS. As I write these words, at least two major publishers are in negotiations with my agents to purchase publishing rights to The Kali Quartet. It will be at least a week [...]

Feedback from the friend of a well-known film director who bought my first original screenplay, which he intends to make in the coming year or two. It’s an English-language script, based on an original story by me, with screenplay and dialogues by me as well. I say “English-language” but there are scenes in Arabic, Aramaic, [...]

The 7th Mandala of the Rig Veda (quoted above) tells us of a great and terrible war called Dasarajna: The Battle of Ten Kings. In that legendary conflict, ten major tribal chiefs (kings) of the ancient world sought to displace and destroy Raja Sudas of the Bharata tribe. The ten kings were supported by numerous [...]

Hi. As requested by several of you, I’ve created a Request A Book page where you can fill in your details and book a copy of any of the forthcoming AKB BOOKS Limited Editions. The best thing about it is that you don’t need to pay in advance to place a request. That’s why it’s [...]

Thanks to one of those extraordinary events that nobody can predict, the situation with my Mba has changed. I’m not going to explain what happened and go into details here, but let’s just say it’s completely unexpected and out of the blue. In my wildest dreams, I couldn’t have guessed this would happen and the [...]

The Rumpus remains my favourite go-to literary blog each day. In fact, I find so many interesting things there that I hesitate to link or re-post them all, as it’s lazy and becomes a convenient way for me to avoid writing my own posts. Someday, I tell myself, I must re-start writing intelligent literary blog [...]

Maureen Tkacik (also known as Moe Tkacik) is a writer and journalist based in New York. She’s worked at the Wall Street Journal, Jezebel and freelanced as well. I liked this essay by her in Columbia Journalism Review about her experiences in journalism and how journalism has changed. It’s not strictly a ‘Why’ I write [...]

This is an old book review by me. I don’t recall where it was published and don’t have an online link, although it was fairly recent – so it was probably one of a couple of book reviews I agreed to do for Times of India. The reason was obvious: the subject was one of [...]

The Rumpus has become my go-to literary website every morning. I always seem to find something of interest there (and I don’t mean the explicitly pornographic websites that advertise on the site – yes, I’m not kidding). It’s a literary Work-in-Progress. I also enjoy Stephen Elliott’s ruminative email updates each morning in my mailbox, which [...]

I don’t recall exactly where this book review first appeared. But I know when it appeared. as the first line suggests, it was the same year that Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’ was published, probably within a week or two of it’s publication. I still stand by the review – ‘Youngblood Hawke’ is a great goddamn [...]

Did you know that if an author wants to buy copies of his own work, he has to pay more than a bookstore pays the publisher for the same books? That’s right – the author gets worse terms than the bookstore gets! Not only that, publishers actually penalize authors for buying copies of their own [...]

FINAL UPDATE 7 JULY: DAVIDAR/PENGUIN SEXUAL HARASSMENT AND ASSAULT CASE SETTLED OUT OF COURT, DEFENDANTS MUZZLED. As expected (and as predicted by me), the Davidar case has been settled for an undisclosed but allegedly quite substantial sum of money. So much for all the Davidar apologists who defended him in the face of his predatory [...]

FINAL UPDATE 7 JULY: DAVIDAR/PENGUIN SEXUAL HARASSMENT AND ASSAULT CASE SETTLED OUT OF COURT, DEFENDANTS MUZZLED. As expected (and as predicted by me), the Davidar case has been settled for an undisclosed but allegedly quite substantial sum of money. So much for all the Davidar apologists who defended him in the face of his predatory [...]