Trickster City: Writings from the Belly of the Metropolis [Hardcover] Sarda Shveta

Trickster City is an extraordinary composite of writings on Delhi by a group of young people who have over several years sustained among themselves and with others around them a relationship of conversing about the city. This collection chronicles the loss of home and livelihood through urban eviction; encounters with the agencies of the state; love stories gone awry; the fragility of relationships; and the sustained effort to build life in anticipation of beauty and pleasure. The writers draw from experiences events and biographies part fictive part documentary to inscribe an image of the city that is rarely available. There is a yearning in their writings for the expression of the poetic and allegorical alongside the harshness of everyday existence. Trickster is an aphoristic and playful meander in search of a new language that expresses the profound uncertainties and delicately realised joys of urban life. Praise for Trickster City 'Trickster City is the gentle compassionate anti-dote to the mass of mail-fisted representations of the ‘under-class’ that has become so popular these days. The writers that make up this collection are almost amazing in their restraint their ability to distil that perfect moment that conjures up the times they live in. Story after story evokes the ways in which people keep love alive while a kind of terror the terror of being poor in a cruel city lurks offstage just a midnight knock away. If you put your ear to this book you will be able to hear people breathing if you touch it you will be able to feel their fragile but furious pulse. If you read this book you will be greatly rewarded.' —Arundhati Roy 'Trickster City is a groundbreaking collection of writings about the South Asian city its authors so free in their intelligence and imagination that they put conventional pious analysis to shame—and demonstrate ultimately that even the most pressing material circ