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Literary Review
Teen queen
IF Yann Martel is delighted about winning the Booker, Penguin India is not far behind. Penguin India had the literary sense to buy the rights for The Life of Pi from Canongate, its original publisher. Its parent company, Penguin U.K., on the other hand, had rejected the book when it came to them as a script. The Booker has come as a gift, by divine coincidence, the very year Penguin India is celebrating 15 years of publishing.
Perhaps it is not coincidence, nothing of this kind is. Beginning with just five titles and a teak table, the press says it now publishes close to 200 books a year. If many of those are forgettable, most are not: their authors range from Shobha De to Romila Thapar; their production standards are usually excellent.
To celebrate turning 15, Penguin promises an "Editor's Choice" series of cheap reprints of books published abroad, by authors like Mario Vargas Llosa and Orhan Pamuk. (Curiously, one such title, by Sandor Marai, has an enthusiastic recommendation on its cover from David Davidar, none other than Penguin's boss. Though this is rather like a mother telling us how incredible her baby is, we'll believe him since he quotes himself from his own column in The Hindu.).
This reprint strategy competes with Picador India's policy of publishing foreign books at astonishingly low Indian prices. HarperCollins India, now an India Today owned company, is, according to the grapevine, also planning cheap editions of books published abroad. The days of being punched between the eyes with dollar prices look like they're history.
ANURADHA ROY
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