A field guide of sorts, this book compiles brief portraits of at least a hundred varieties of birds in India—including in the Western Ghats, Karnataka, Meghalaya and the Himalayas— combining illustrations with details on their habits, identification marks, nest-building techniques, prey, migration routes, how they associate with other birds and where one might spot them. It also contemplates the diversity of their behaviour, as well as the ways in which habitat loss is threatening them.
Juggernaut, Rs 899, 124 pages
The Ghazal Eros revisits the millennium-long literary history of the ghazal— ranging from tenth-century Baghdad to the major eighteenth-century poets of the Indian subcontinent, as well as modern writers—to study its expressions of what the author calls “lyric queerness,” or “masculine passion (ishq) for the masculine beloved.”