Fables, con stories and 'meeting cute'

NEW RELEASES

Sycorax: New Fables and Poems
Suniti Namjoshi
Penguin Books India
Rs 195
141 pages

"In Shakespeare's Tempest, Sycorax is already dead when Prospero and Miranda arrive on the island. The Sycorax in my poem is still alive . . . She is still defiant, still fierce, but she is old and knows that death is no longer so far away . . . I wanted to follow Sycorax, keep her company, as it were, up to the final moment."

In poems, both satirical and elegiac, and myths and fables, created and imaginatively retold, fabulist Suniti Namjoshi presents a unique world view that redefines familiar landscapes and challenges accepted social perceptions.

Sycorax: New Fables and Poems is a signature display of the wit and compassion that have made Namjoshi's work so popular among readers across continents.

The stories are pithy, rarely exceeding two or three pages in length; some of the titles alone will draw you into them (samples: "Wolf Story III", "Baa Lamb Foxtrot" and "The Stellification of the One-Eyed Monkey"). This book continues the welcome recent trend of making beloved old stories accessible to a modern readership.

Cat O' Nine Tales
Jeffrey Archer
Pan Macmillan
£2.99
255 pages

This is the fifth collection of short stories from one of the world's most popular writers of fiction, many of them written during the two years he spent in prison.

Included here are "The Man Who Robbed His Own Post Office" with its self-explanatory title; "The Red King", about a con man who discovers that an English Lord requires one more chess piece to complete a set that would be worth a fortune; "The Commissioner", wherein another con artist (in Bombay) ends up in the morgue after he uses the police chief as bait in his latest scam; and "In the Eye of the Beholder", Archer's own favourite, about a premier division football who falls in love with a 20-stone woman.

Once Upon a Timezone...
Neelesh Misra
HarperCollins
Rs 195
246 pages

Once upon a Timezone is a light-hearted look at two people, in two different continents who are both dealing with different varieties of prejudice.

In the heart of middle-class India, Neel Pandey, just out of college, dreams day and night of his first love "" America "" and also of escaping from his father's desire to land an upper caste daughter-in-law.

Unable to go to the US, Neel takes the second best option "" a job at a call centre where he assumes an American identity. Meanwhile, in New York, Angela Cruz has escaped her racist father and life in Jackson, Mississippi, and is a journalist chasing her big story "" of a school band of immigrant kids in a New York suburb who have been selected to perform at a musical extravaganza but don't have the money to fly there.

Angela buys a computer, it malfunctions, and she calls the call centre to scream at them. She runs into Neel, and, many conversations later, they tumble into a faraway romance "" making it the classic "meet-cute" scenario of romantic films, except that this one has a very international feel to it.