Welcome to our new series in which we ask women who rock our worlds to recommend books that rocked their world. Every week we will bring you a book that every woman should read.
Annie Zaidi is the author of Love Stories # 1 to 14; co-author of The Bad Boy’s Guide to the Good Indian Girl; and a collection of essays Known Turf: Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales. She also writes poetry and plays. Her work has appeared in several anthologies and literary journals including The Little Magazine, Pratilipi, Out of Print; Caravan and Desilit. When we asked her to recommend a book she immediately suggested the new Suniti Namjoshi Reader.
She said, “I finished reading The Fabulous Feminist a few months ago and have since been quite annoyed about why I came to read Suniti Namjoshi so very late in my reading life. And why can I not find any of her books in stores? Why is she not discussed as one of the the most important writers in the subcontinent? Why has she not won many important prizes?Her writing is both wry and brave, rooted and uprooting. It is, in fact, as the title suggests fabulous writing. The title is punning on the fact that Namjoshi wrote (or re-wrote) fables with a feminist sensibility. They make me want to hand-copy each one and put it up on my Facebook wall. Or turn them into graffiti. I cannot wait for my niece to grow up a bit more so I can start reading these stories out to her. Each one is an examination of the self and the crisis of identity and finding acceptance by one’s community (including feminist or lesbian or feminist-lesbian communities).The book contains brief extracts from most of her novels and collections of stories, and I cannot wait to get my hands on all of those. But for those who haven’t read much of Namjoshi’s work, this reader is an excellent starting place. “