Twilight Prisoners

Born in Shillong, India, Siddhartha Deb lives in Harlem, New York. His fiction and nonfiction have been longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, and been awarded the Pen Open Prize. His journalism and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Guardian, New Republic, Baffler, n+1, Dissent, and Caravan.

“Deb’s writing demonstrates deep familiarity with Indian politics and the ability to write for a non-Indian audience. For Americans reading this collection, there will inevitably be a comparison with the emergence of the Christian Right and the MAGA movement in recent years….  Overall, this book is an eminently engaging and politically astute collection of essays that critique the growth of Hindu nationalism, the absurd and ahistorical mythology that undergirds it, and the violence experienced by minorities in India.” —Socialism and DemocracyPraise for Siddhartha Deb“One of the most distinctive writers to have emerged from South Asia in the last two decades.” —Pankaj MishraPraise for The Light at the End of the WorldA New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice“Extraordinary . . . I was in awe of Deb’s imagination and razor-sharp prose. The hallucinatory quality of his narrative reminded me of William Burroughs’s ‘Naked Lunch,’ while its apocalyptic trajectory had echoes of Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Blood Meridian’ . . . That the novel invokes a glorious past, hints at a utopian future and contradicts reality could be the author’s way to protest an authoritarian government skilled in just that . . . Whatever the author’s intent, I felt privileged to have been on an odyssey quite unlike any other.” —Abraham Verghese, The New York Times Book Review“The Light at the End of the World is full of intriguing puzzles and opacities, but what brings it to life is less its inventiveness than its galvanizing anger, its outraged awareness of exploitation and cruelty. It travels, unbounded, into the past and the future, yet it always meets the reader in the middle of these destinations, the broken world of the present.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal“Deb explores a range of alternative explanations for and ramifications of historical events . . . Working in a speculative mode, Deb imagines a kind of agency for his characters barred to them by historical, and present, realities.” —The New Republic

• Introduction: The India RacketChapter 2. What is India? Why India’s Boom Years Have Been a BustChapter 3. The Violence, Insecurity, and Rage of Narendra ModiChapter 4. Arundhati Roy: The RenegadeChapter 5. The Killing of Gauri LankeshChapter 6. The Worst Industrial Disaster in the History of the WorldChapter 7. Nowhere Land: Along India’s Border, a Forgotten Burmese RebellionChapter 8. Those Mythological Men and Their Sacred Supersonic Flying TemplesChapter 9. The Detention Centers of AssamChapter 10. India’s Political PrisonersChapter 11. The Temple and The MosqueConclusion