Harris Books and Literature Blog

( Purchase book at Amazon ) ( Watch film on Amazon Prime ) Delta of Venus is a collection of erotic stories. In the preface of the book, Anais Nin has mentioned that she wrote these stories around 1940 for an ‘anonymous client’ of a book collector she knew. It all started with Henry Miller, her famous friend, who wrote stories for the ‘client’ for money. Gradually, he involved her and their other friends in the project. They all set their wild imaginations free and started writing stories of lust and desire to order. And the stories Anais Nin wrote were what later became ‘Delta of Venus’. It is obvious that these stories are less literature and more porn. Because the anonymous buyer of these stories kept telling her to dump poetry and philosophy and focus more on raw sexual descriptions. It was not an easy task for the writer, though. As a consequence, you can see the unpleasant tension of a fight between poesy and porn throughout the book. The struggle between her poetic imagination ...

                                                                         The Runaways The Runaways   by Fatima Bhutto is a story mainly revolving around three young characters, Sunny, Monty, and Layla. It has a simple plot yet involves some complex themes and is narrated in a captivating language. Sunny is from a Pakistani family in the UK. Monty and Layla are from Karachi. They go their own separate ways and reach the Islamic terrorist camp in the deserts of Iraq, each of them with their own intentions and missions to accomplish. The narrative continuously switches between the past and present events, which added to the excitement of the read. However, the past stories are not mentioned as mere reminiscences in a ha...

                                                                       Delhi: A Soliloquy (Malayalam) Delhi Gathakal  portrays the lives of ordinary people in Delhi beset with the turmoil of Indo-Pak and Indo-China wars and their aftermath, the Emergency, and the anti-Sikh riots. The novel progresses through the stories of a bunch of protagonists, especially Malayalis living in Delhi from the early 1960s to the present. The work is important in that it records, using the tools of fiction, a certain period in the history of a particular region. However, a major disappointment was that the narration was purely linear following a traditional storytelling style and hardly using any modern techniques of fiction. The novel is almost entirely set in Delhi and hence replete with...