Bøker av Meena Kandasamy

A narrative of the early modern Indian sculpture known as the Mithuna couple. Meena Kandasamy writes about the Mithuna couple, a seventeenth-century ivory sculpture from Tamil Nadu, India, depicting lovers. Kandasamy unfurls a multi-layered, multi-directional narrative built from images, questions, and contradictions evoked by the sculpture. "How can we look at this work and not talk about who produced it?" Kandasamy asks and then examines how caste and class are carved into the object as indelibly as its physical details. Such knowledge complicates easy associations of love that may be evoked by the couple. Refusing any impulse to idealize or exoticize, Kandasamy connects the carving to personal and political stories that expose painful realities of who gets to love whom, and how. She sets the intimate alongside the institutional to interrogate terms such as decolonize, restitution, and preservation. Through an astonishing stylistic mix, including Twitter, academic discourse, poetry, and memoir, she talks back, forward, and sideways with the object.

The Book of Desire is the award-winning (and Women''s Prize-shortlisted) writer Meena Kandasamy''s luminous translation of the Kamattu-p-pal, a 2000-year-old song of love and pleasure and the third part of the Thirukkural - one of the most important texts in Tamil literature. Written by the poet Thiruvalluvar, the Kamattu-p-pal section of the Thirukkural focuses on love and female sensuality. It is the most intimate section of this great work - and also, historically, the part that has been most heavily censored. Although hundreds of male translations of the text have been published, it has also only ever been translated by a woman once before. The Book of Desire is Meena''s own feminist reclamation of the Kamattu-p-pal. With her trademark wit, lyricism and passionate insight, she weaves a magic spell: taking the reader on a journey through 250 kurals (short verses), organised under separate headings - ''The Pleasure of Sex'', ''Renouncing Shame'', ''The Delights of Sulking - the result is a fresh, vital, and breath-taking translation. This is a book that fizzes with energy, is full of delight - that conveys powerful messages about female sensuality, agency, and desire. It is a revolution 2000 years in the making.

A slim, inventive novella that questions what divides fiction and memoir - Exquisite Cadavers is a bricolage of influence and a daring modernist short.

From one of India's boldest and most badass young voices, Kandasamy's second novel is a dazzling and provocative novelised account of her own abusive marriage.

A mighty thunderclap of a novel, The Gypsy Goddess is set to launch Meena Kandasamy as a brazen, inventive, provocative star