My Seditious Heart: Collected Nonfiction

This book by a very critical author, came in the best condition ---- very clean and excellently packaged. Arundhati Roy is a writer after my own heart and Bruce is a bookseller who delivers high quality works with commendable speed. I'll buy from this store again in a heartbeat.

An amazing author and intrepid freedom fighter!

People keep trying to pin down what kind of a writer Arundhati Roy is. She has written two imaginative and widely-read novels, The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, but has also done a considerable amount of political non-fiction, leading her to be branded a “writer-activist.” “Sort of like a sofa-bed,” she says, and you can hear her snorting. She writes, “For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.” The subjects of her essays are, along with caste and women’s rights, the troubles in Kashmir, “nuclear bombs, Big Dams, corporate globalization, and the rising threat of communal Hindu fascism,” as well as her measuring of “the corporate-military cabal of ‘empire’ at work.” (The dams are a series of these structures in India that have resulted in massive evictions of the Adivasi population and increasing ecological disaster.) My Seditious Heart is a thousand-page omnibus bringing together pieces published in smaller volumes over the last twenty years; in them, as mentioned, she shows an extraordinary skill in guiding us in few words and pages through some terrifically complex situations, but we read them for the fire of her moral insight as well as for information. Because she deals so often with the “less pretty and more complicated” side of things—her essay “Capitalism: A Ghost Story,” for instance, is the most powerful evocation of the obscenity of corporate wealth and influence I’ve read—my first thought was to compare My Seditious Heart to the experience of reading Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States; it’s an awful lot of bad news all at one time, and as often as not can be painful reading about what she calls “this restive, despairing time.” But other comparisons struck me: “Public Power in the Age of Empire” is something you can put next to Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” and her involvement and urgency made me think of Camus’s wartime writing; Roy really earns and warrants these comparisons. The pendant to My Seditious Heart is Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction. (Penguin, 2020), her nonfiction published from 2018 to 2020. In addition to the beautiful opening essay on the centrality of translation in the multilingual cultures of India, there is much on the continuing terror of the right-wing Hindutva movement, and harrowing news of the war zone that is contemporary Kashmir (“Azadi” is the Kashmiri word and battle cry for “freedom”). “The Graveyard Talks Back” is a superb piece on the uses of fiction in the time of fake news, as an action in disregard of “The Project of Unseeing.” The final essay in Azadi is on the current pandemic, and gives a right, blessed end-note: “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.” We hope, we hope.--From Glenn's Book Notes

The fact that all the negative reviews are 1 star & limited to a single sentence of personal attacks , name-calling & hateful rhetoric tells one about the intention & quality of Arundhati Roy’s distractors.Contrary to what most Indians assume about Arundhati Roy, she is not some firebrand ideologue raging against the system , she is actually playing the role of a journalist ( or having to rather , since ppl who call themselves journalists in India are just cheer-leaders & propagandists of an increasingly ethnifascist state) .And it is in that role she is unexpectedly brilliant . Exposing through her meticulous research & fact-finding , the travesties & injustices & robbery being meted out to people & groups & regions under the garb of development & nationalismIndia’s national narrative is increasingly one of tropes , falsehoods & delusions and amidst this landscape of moral & intellectual darkness these essays twinkle like little stars of truth & honesty , guiding those of us who are not yet blinded by the glitz & glamor of India’s malls & the IPL after-parties

I now have the book in hand and am reading it. It is every bit as excellent as I thought it would be. I read a lot and can freely say it is one of the most important books that I have ever read. Arundhati Roy is a wise, extremely intelligent, courageous, and compassionate person and fine writer. I am reading it slowly because the book deserves the time, concentration, and care.

I have never read a book this terrible!This doesn't look like the work of an artist! The basic of writing is missing! Save time and read something from real writers!

Waste of time

A big, ol' collection of Arundhati Roy's non-fiction writings. Very informative about 1 of the biggest and most populous countries in the world.

Reads like a history of India in the 20 years between her 2 fiction books - a fairly secret history that is secret no more thanks to Arundhati and those who are strong enough and talented enough to be like her.Along with Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein and Yanis Varoufakis, this collection confirms Arundhati Roy as a key voice of our times.I can't recommend this is enough for anyone who wants better insight into the deadly effects and the wanton destruction (social and ecological) of the pursuit of corporate Hindutva.She mainly focuses on India of course but also explains the situation we are in, to different degrees, in every country. This is one brave woman. Speaking out as she does in the cauldron of far-right fervour that has been bred in India means she is always at risk, of persecution, arrest and worse.She bares witness, researchers in details and explains in her powerfully clear way the stories of people and lands that have no voice and no coverage in the corporate media in their fight against eradication.It's a big read (1000 pages) that is set in chronological order and contains all her key big essays, introductions and speeches. One could just dip into it, but I tackled it from start to finish and is well worth the effort.

Beautiful collection of brave insightful essays by one who is unafraid to be the voice of dissent. That is not however the main aim of the book. Intoxicated as always by her incisive, evocative use of language. Her words will lift you through the length of the book with pleasure and with ease!

It is this woman who can churn an art out of a political essay. The topics chosen are by no means a soft target i.e., nuclear test, big dams, kashmir, naxals, etc., towards which every average Indian has a very strong prejudice.These essays will shake the very fundamental ideological elements upon which the prejudice is built.Author's observations are not merely theoretical, rather an outcome of extensive travel to the affected areas and close association with concerned movements for decades. If you are ready to face the facts beyond the accepted norms, go for it...Beware, this might break your pro-development nationalism..!!

If you have never read Roy's works, it is ok. You must pick this one up. It is a collector's delight.