Books

Between being and nothingness: Yiyun Li picks acceptance as a way of living

Yiyun Li is an award-winning Chinese-American author with multiple novels and short story collections to her name

More from Less for More: Can innovation bridge India's quality gap?

Mashelkar and Borde argue that true innovation doesn't cut corners or chase exclusivity. It expands access, raises quality and proves that efficiency and equity can coexist

Voice of the people: Book explains why speeches matter in a democracy

Ms Gupta's selection captures not the speeches alone but the parry and thrust that goes on between the treasury and Opposition benches. CPI (M) leader, late Sitaram Yechury never disrupted parliament

Searches: Book explains how we turned to internet to understand ourselves

The strength of Searches, despite its banal moments, lies in the breathing space allowed to each digital experiment without judgments or definitive conclusions

David Szalay beats Kiran Desai to win 2025 Booker Prize for novel 'Flesh'

Hungarian British author David Szalay was named the winner of the Booker Prize 2025 for his novel Flesh', beating Kiran Desai's The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny' at a ceremony in London on Monday night. Szalay, 51, was presented with 50,000 pounds and a trophy by last year's Booker winner Samantha Harvey for his novel about an emotionally detached man who is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp. Using only the sparest of prose, this hypnotically tense and compelling book becomes an astonishingly moving portrait of a man's life, the Booker Prize judges said of their winning choice. Desai missed out on becoming only the fifth double winner in Booker Prize's 56-year history, having won the coveted literary prize for fiction back in 2006 for The Inheritance of Loss'. I wanted to write a book about global loneliness through the lens of a long, unresolved love story, Desai has said of her new novel. I wanted to write a present-day romance with an old-fashioned beauty. In t

Waste Wars: How rich nations legally dump toxic waste on poor countries

How the rich world exploits loopholes to legally dump toxic waste on poor nations in Asia, Africa and South America

Mother Mary Comes To Me: The book goes beyond the mother-daughter sob story

Ms Roy's radical and radiant life is the subject of the book but the messaging around it has flattened a complex narrative into a sob story of a daughter wronged by her mother

On the Margins of Protection: How refugee rights are being redefined

With right-wing populism on the rise, refugee protection is seen as a problem. This book examines how protection works across contexts, shaped by history and geopolitics

S Muralidhar's book spotlights SC's fault lines and judicial fallibility

In the current discourse on the basic law of the country, the Constitution, leaders of both the ruling and the Opposition blocs are engaged in its competitive veneration, pronouncing it sacrosanct

The Wisdom of Plagues: Book traces lessons not learned from pandemics

Covid-19 was the saddest pandemic NYT reporter Donald G McNeil ever covered. Now he shows how outbreaks like AIDS and Ebola foreshadowed the next in patterns, responses, and impact

Facing a 'reading crisis,' Denmark to make books cheaper by cutting tax

The Danish government announced this week that it planned to make books exempt from a 25 percent value-added tax

Meet the Savarnas: Ravikant Kisana's book on millennials and exclusion

For a society so deeply entrenched in caste and class, the cognitive dissonance is astonishing. Caste is ancient history one moment, yet dictates marriage or who works at your house the next

Inside India's polls: flaws, fraud, and the battle to save democracy

Author SY Quraishi dwells on the Model Code of Conduct and other aspects of holding elections, including the role of exit polls, media and hate speech

Can you make peace with your smartphone? Two books explore the idea

With this book, the author calcifies some of the deposits heavy phone use has left on her soul

India in Flux offers up new ways to think about complex challenges ahead

Few could have played the role Shankar Acharya did-navigating political, fiscal, and global pressures with clarity and conviction

A Billion Butterflies: This book drops truth bombs on climate change

How an old deal over a supercomputer explains the politics behind climate science today

Mehran Gul's debut book decodes the innovation ecosystem through its people

We see the United States as the source of just about all the technologies that define modern life, and most of the companies that created them are based there. But is that changing

The Johnson & Johnson Files: Unhealthy truths and defective hip implants

A tale of defective hip implants exposes India's weak medical oversight - and how multinationals treat Indian patients worse than those in rich countries

'Drugstore beetle' endangers 1,000-year-old library, 100,000 books

Tens of thousands of centuries-old books are being pulled from the shelves of a medieval abbey in Hungary in an effort to save them from a beetle infestation that could wipe out centuries of history. The 1,000-year-old Pannonhalma Archabbey is a sprawling Benedictine monastery that is one of Hungary's oldest centres of learning and a UNESCO World Heritage site. Restoration workers are removing about 100,000 handbound books from their shelves and carefully placing them in crates, the start of a disinfection process that aims to kill the tiny beetles burrowed into them. The drugstore beetle, also known as the bread beetle, is often found among dried foodstuffs like grains, flour and spices. But they also are attracted to the gelatin and starch-based adhesives found in books. They have been found in a section of the library housing around a quarter of the abbey's 400,000 volumes. This is an advanced insect infestation which has been detected in several parts of the library, so the en

Tribals and the Hindutva framework: New book explores RSS's evolving views

From Sarna to Ghar Wapsi, this book breaks new ground on the evolution of RSS's thinking on tribals and complex questions such as their treatment after conversion to Christianity