The Sunday Haul (on 27-5-2018)

The first thing I saw at Abids last Sunday made my heart leap with joy. There were more than two dozen issues of Indian Literature in two stacks with a seller. I sat down and looked at each and every issue carefully searching for some name that would catch my eye. I was looking for stories by Arun Joshi or something interesting in those well preserved books. I wished I could buy all of them but I knew it wasn’t possible. Finally I found an issue with an interesting title on the cover- Men and Books by Adoor Gopalakrishnan. I picked up the May-June 2003 Issue 215 and looked at some of the contents. The issue had a tribute to Sisir Kumar Das, described as the ‘greatest scholar of Indian Literature’ which was something I was not aware of. Then there were the usual book reviews, poems (one by a Telugu poet- Mandrapu Hymavathy), stories, essays, and also literary criticism. I have it on my table at the office and will go through it piece by piece whenever I find time.

A couple of months earlier I had come across a Margery Allingham title but I gave it a miss because it did not appear interesting enough. A few weeks after that I read in a book that listed the 100 great crime novels that Margery Allingham was one crime writer not to be missed. Though I do not remember now which Margery Allingham title was listed in that book I did remember the name of the author. So when I saw a copy of ‘Coroner’s Pidgin’ by Margery Allingham with the same seller from whom I had bought the copy of Indian Literature.
I got both these titles for eighty rupees only.