The Difficulty of Being Good ( No ref to Mr. Gurcharan Das’s book)

The experience of being at the book fair is an exhilarating one. There are people-excited people, tired people, curious people, even some jaded people but the one kind of people that have caught our attention most are the little people. Kids ( including teenagers here) are often accompanied by their parents ( or is it [...]

AWOL or what?

No, we haven’t gone AWOL. The last few months at the FriendsOfBooks office have been terrifically busy. First we had technical housekeeping  that was on TOP priority and then there was some literal housekeeping chores that needed attention as we made space for even more books (Yay!). In the mean, the off -office hours have [...]

Author Interview : Sunil Robert

Sunil Robert’s book I Will Survive is the story of the author’s own life- the tumultuous years of growing up in small town India, his struggles to make sense of the world around him and his learning the skills to negotiate the dark realities and emerge as a successful corporate executive. FriendsOfBooks chatted with the [...]

A year?Already?

It was a quiet birthday…especially for a one year old. We launched FriendsOfBooks a year ago, with a quiet email to friends and well wishers. The email went out late at night. We had been working on the website for a long time but as the launch date approached the days and nights had become [...]

Risen from the bed!

Hello and yeah, yeah, yeah…its been almost two months since the last post and there is no excuse- None whatsoever! So since it rained where we are (Delhi) yesterday, and new buds shot out of our parched plants and tiny new sprouts of fresh ideas pop, pop, popped out of our heads, you’ll see many [...]

Serious Popular Fiction by Anuradha Marwah For years in the West people made a distinction between high and low art: serious literary fiction and popular novels. Serious used to be worthy or ‘great’ literature, usually realistic and message driven, prescribed to the impressionable for the elevation of their souls; whereas the popular was allied with [...]

I think I’ve got a book in me…How can I be sure that I’m good enough to be an author?

I’ve had extensive opportunities to interact with book lovers and potential authors across India during my ongoing “The eMedha Paradigm” book tour. During these in-person as well as electronic (mails, chats, website-comments, etc) interactions, quite a few questions have kept on popping back almost rhetorically. One such question that I’ve been asked quite frequently is: [...]

When do I return my books?

If you are looking for ye olde date stamp on the back of the books..it ain’t happenin’ anymore! Do you remember the little slip pasted on the front page with gunky glue from the big blue bottle. The one on which the ever-sulking librarian stamped a date by which you had to return the book…or [...]

What was the writer thinking?

If you are like us, once you zero in on an author you really like, you probably find that you have to read everything the person ever wrote. You would want to know all that goes on inside the author’s head. Do they have common place insecurities about their work like the rest of us, [...]

More on Jaipur Literature Festival

If you weren’t at the Jaipur Literature Festival this year, plan on being there next time…we for sure are! We almost didn’t make it. It is hard to give up the daily work routine and harder still for us to accept that “This IS work”. Too many years of corporate offices and jobs will do [...]