Jerry Pinto Reading and Book Launch

Toto Funds the Arts

in association with

The British Council Library

is pleased to invite you to a reading-cum-launch of

Jerry Pinto’s Em and the Big Hoom

He will be in conversation with writer and critic Arul Mani

Date and Time: Friday, 1 February 2013, 6.30 p.m.

Venue:  The British Library, Prestige Takt, 23 Kasturba Road Cross, Bangalore

Em and the Big Hoom (Aleph) may be Jerry Pinto’s first novel but it is by no means his first book. He is the editor of The Greatest Show on Earth, an anthology of writing about Bollywood, and Reflected in Water: Writings about Goa. He is the co-editor, with Naresh Fernandes of Bombay Meri Jaan: Writings about Mumbai, and with Arundhati Subramaniam, of Confronting Love, an anthology of love poems by Indian poets writing in English, and with Rachel Dwyer of Beyond Bollywood, a collection of essays. He is also the author of Asylum, a collection of poems; and of Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb, for which he won the National Award for the Best Writing on Cinema in 2006. He worked with Leela Naidu on her autobiography, Leela; A Patchwork Life. When Crows are White is the first graphic novel on which he has collaborated with Garima Gupta.

About Em and the Big Hoom

“a profoundly moving book”–– Amitav Ghosh. 

“A rare, brilliant book, one that is wonderfully different from any other that I have read coming out of India”–– Kiran Desai   

 “No one since James Joyce and Arundhati Roy has been better able to capture the bewilderment of a child and his mother in a mad, mad world. No one since Sophocles and Sigmund Freud has been able to postulate that madness might be the very stuff of maternity. No one since Sylvia Plath and Mark Haddon has been able to make us cringe viscerally at the sadness of the mind.”–– The Deccan Chronicle

“Dom Moraes once told me that when he asked the English poet Stephen Spender for advice, the latter replied, "Go suffer, and sing." One can't help but sense the great suffering that obviously underlies this book. And, through it, rise the bright, sweet, heart-breaking notes of Pinto's song.” –– India Today