The India China Institute invites you to a reading of selections from The Country is Yours: Contemporary Nepali Literature by Manjushree Thapa. Friday, 4 September, 2009 6:30-8:00PM Wollman Hall 65 W 11th Street The New School

The Country is Yours: Contemporary Nepali Literature Translated and introduced by Manjushree Thapa

Modern Nepali literature started in the 1930s. As a response to state censorship, one group of high modernists sought to locate human freedom in the play of language. Another group wrote more directly in favor of social justice. From these pioneers emerged the ‘democrats’ and the ‘progressives’, the distinctions between who have gradually blurred since the re-establishment of democracy in 1990. The Country Is Yours is a collection of contemporary Nepali literature. Organized in four sections- ‘The Perplexity of Living’, ‘The Right to Desire’, ‘The Imminent Liberation’ and ‘Visions’- the stories and poems of the 49 writers included here offer a view onto the upheavals of Nepali Society, Politics and Identity leading up to and after 1990. They also speak of the universal joys and sorrows of the human condition. Translated and introduced by Manjushree Thapa, this volume sensitively captures the spirit of a society at the threshold of transformation. Manjushree Thapa is a writer from Nepal, the author of many well-received books of fiction and nonfiction. Her essays and opinions have appeared widely in the Nepali and international media, including in the New York Times. Her fiction titles are Tilled Earth, a collection of short stories about Nepalis and the Nepali diaspora; The Tutor of History, a novel set in a small highway town in Nepal during a general election; and the upcoming Seasons of Flight, a novel about a Nepali woman who wins the US government’s diversity visa lottery and lands in Los Angeles. Her non-fiction titles are Forget Kathmandu, a personal account of Nepal’s political upheavals, with reportage on the Maoist insurgency; Mustang Bhot in Fragments, a travelogue to villages on the Nepal-Tibet border; and the upcoming A Boy from Siklis, a biography of the groundbreaking Nepali environmentalist Chandra Gurung. Her oeuvre includes several titles of literary translations, including Secret Places: New Writing from Nepal, published by the University of Hawai’i Press, which she co-edited.”