Synopsis'This riddle can end in two ways: speech and defeat, or silence and death.' Vetaal and Vikram is a playful retelling of one of India's most celebrated cycles of stories. The narrative of King Vikram and the Vetaal is located within the Kathasaritsagara, an eleventh-century Sanskrit text. The Vetaal who is neither living nor dead is a consummate storyteller, and Vikram is a listener who can neither speak nor stay silent. Together they are destined to walk a labyrinth of stories in the course of a moonless night in a cremation ground. In 1870, eleven of the Vetaal's stories were adapted to English by the famed scholar-explorer Richard Francis Burton who tailored them to his audience's gothic taste. Vetaal and Vikram is a contemporary response that includes Burton within its storytelling folds. Fantastical and delightful, this retelling dissolves the lines between speaker and listener, desire and duty, life and death.
Enjoying reading this book?
Binding: HardBack
About the author
Post graduate in Mass Communication from Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, an MPhil in Creative Writing from Swansea University in the United Kingdom and a PhD in English from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in the United States Gayathri Prabhu is an Indian novelist presently living in Manipal Karnataka.
She presently teaches at the Manipal Centre for Humanities (MAHE). She has authored novels The Untitled ,Birdswim Fishfly and Maya (Indialog Publications, 2003). Recenty Gayathri has been awarded R K Narayan Award for Literature 2019 . Earlier she has won the prestigious Vreeland Award at the University of Nebraska for best creative manuscript in 2011. In 2018 her memoir If I Had To Tell It Again was shortlisted for famous Atta Galatta Bangalore Literature Festiva; in Sept. 2018. She was also among the five short listed authors for prestigious Sushila Devi literature Award for ‘The Best Book Of Fiction Written by A Woman Author In English & published in 2016 & 2017.
Vetaal and Vikram: Riddles of the Undead is her latest novel. It is a playful retelling of the stories Indians have been reading since childhood in ‘Chandamama’ or being told and retold through generations. She has wit fully taken back the retelling where Lord Shiva tells his best story to Parvati and thus make Shiva the sutradhaar or the prompter.
'If I Had to Tell it Again', the memoir was longlisted under the category of Best Non Fiction (English) in the Atta Galatta Bangalore Literature Festival in September 2018.[40] Prabhu was shortlisted as one of the five authors for the prestigious Sushila Devi Literature Award For 'The Best Book Of Fiction Written By A Woman Author', in English and publish.
Road to Success: Putting the Principles of Think and Grow Rich Into Action in Your Life
by Napoleon Hill
