July 2022
In this issue
Contents
Indie Publishers & Booksellers
Welcome to the first edition of The Bangalore Review Roundtable, where we discuss Indie Publishing & Bookselling in India. This session is moderated by Sucharita Dutta-Asane, Fiction Editor at The Bangalore Review.
TBR Recommends – July 2022
Every month, The Bangalore Review recommends a reading list, also mentioning in brief why each book must be read. This month’s list has been compiled by Sekhar Banerjee.
Stepping into the Dark
I imagined her soul, slipping into muted sleep, slowing its swirl, dimming its spectrum of colors – until like a photo, darkening to monochrome, she would become the very depth and quiet of her own shadow. Fire slowly dims, coal blackens, into night.
Ode to Beets
Prisoners could enroll in college courses and some even taught. The people of Alabama often formed remarkable friendships with the prisoners and gave them many gifts, as well as invitations to their homes for a meal. After the war, many Germans brought their families to vacation in the South and to introduce them to their southern friends. These friendships lasted for decades.
Waiting
The thing about a lake is the crazy men who fish there, in the copper- hearted flow where cold springs and greasy seaweed gather. Shimmer. Buckle. Fish bodies writhe beneath, more life always where one can’t reach. More life always where watching is not allowed.
2 poems by Jane Marston
They were not deer, such as the men had known in Virginia or Vermont, but antelope whose haunches flashed when the heave of portage brought the men too near. The men believed they were something they needed to kill, not just for food or for the pleasure of pursuit, but from a need to supplement,
Sooner Now
And so, it seems it only takes one summer without rain, a drift of weeks, the world gone mean, to make a start then, offer age assent. To give surprised consent, or to at least – time bossy, brooking no dissent – begin to know there is a change now on its way. Not today. Not right away.
Loss of Little Things
I dream each night our house is burning, and I watch and watch. It consumes, I am consumed, by the pit in my gut, burning rubble. Spiders watch from the corners, with their wide shining eyes, but do not spin a line to save me-
The Book Circle Party
“You must go to a lot of Book Circle Parties,” I remarked. “Don’t you?” he asked, eyes surveying the rest of the crowd, looking for someone more malleable than me.
A conspiracy of Mules
Mule carcasses give up ash. Thick and dark. It swirls and swells in the violet sky like a great murmuration. The screams of the mules have subsided, the air thick with the smell of their roasting meat. It is unbearable to these starving people.
The Sea and the Sky
In some ways, I hate what I do, though my feelings have never been distinct. It is more of an unease that creeps into my mind when I see my planet so far beneath me, and, surrounded by the boxes and boxes of products and resources that fill the storage space of my cable car…
Good Hair
I watched with a sullen expression as she struggled to lift her right leg, gingerly rubbing the area of swollen flesh where I’d kicked her thigh. She placed delicate fingers along her bottom lip, still red and swollen from my punch of a few days ago.
The Astronomer’s Garden
And so, the astronomer and the inquisitor pulled and tilled and spread and sowed until Emile’s backyard was one colossal labyrinth of garlic and radishes and roses and towering sunflowers that shaded the humble beds of lettuce and trumpeted the arrival of the spring winds.