Richard Crasta
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"Works in Progress (2021)" is a smorgasbord of nine widely varying pieces: joyful, contemplative, humorous, serious (a public interest essay), personal essays, and dark stories. The memory tax, family pride and ancestor snobbery placed in context (Letters to the Dead), our attitudes to beggars, stories about fatherhood, some tools that may come in handy when talking to writers (or else, or for writers dealing with the public), and many others. Real...
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"I did not know Indians were allowed to write like this," remarked an Indian admirer of "Impressing the Whites" in 2004. He had also read "The Revised Kama Sutra" while a student at the IIT (Kharagpur), and found "Impressing the Whites" and me after a difficult search. The book includes "The Fourteen Commandments of Impressing the Whites," and "The New Spiritual Colonialism," and a letter to Salman Rushdie. The games that whites, blacks, and other...
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A true story of an Indian boy with an American Dream that results in his meeting powerful writers, editors, and Nobel Prizewinners: from Brodsky to John Updike and John Irving. It is also a book full of regrets and self-examination, providing a catalogue of mistakes writers might avoid (such as making a god of freedom of expression, complimenting an editor's beauty, or sending angry faxes to agents). It is a literary thriller leading to some Dark...
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The Secret Lives of Indians, as reflected in this subjective portrait of the Mangalorean Catholic community . Biographies, interviews, and voices of various Mangaloreans--the Unofficial, Uncensored Mind of Mangalore (and by extension India, of which Mangalore is a multi-lingual, multicultural microcosm). Part fiction, part nonfiction, part humor, partly the Untold Truth. With honest and unblinking portraits, the writer honors and shows a deep love...
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An interspecies romance with a cow, Adam and Eve get acquainted, and the battle of the sexes begins--even God isn't spared. The little girl told, in a famous book, to "go the f to sleep" comes up with ten clever ways to say "No!" Hemingway is drunk and aroused as he rewrites The Great Gatsby, cows are interplanetary aliens in disguise, and George W. Bush and his National Spin Council plot to tell the American people, "I stand by all the misstatements...
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This 80,000-word bundle of three books begins with "Eaten by the Japanese," the World War II memoir of John Baptist Crasta, the father of Richard Crasta, who describes what it was like to rediscover his father and reconcile with him just two years before his father's death. The act of reading and publishing his 87-year-old father's almost forgotten memoir was a process of discovery and reconciliation for the son. "Father, Rebel, Dreamer" consists...
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In this story, a father who is strongly attached to his young children finds himself estranged from their mother and tricked into entering a trap, and his major concern, now, is his children. "What did the children see? What did the young, impressionable children that he so loved, and who loved their father, see?" This is a tale of love, sex, power, and of the Indian Matriarchy (which you probably have never heard of), but mainly of children and...
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Jesus Christ, time traveling trip to 21st Century New Jersey, walks into a bar, and confesses his "Daddy Issues" to a customer who asks him what he does. Jesus tries to explain, and soon loses his cool.
So, too, do the Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi, who also time travel to 21st Century New York, only to discover that, no matter how big your Daddy was, or how serious your Daddy issues are, it is not easy to impress a New Yorker to recognize their seriousness,...
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As a child, Vijay Prabhu is bitten by a dog. From that point on, his troubles only increase: cane-wielding, non-singing nuns and priests, a raging erection he thinks is a medical problem, and a passion for words that morphs into a desire to become a novelist in America, like Saul Bellow. He tries to get Jackie Kennedy on board (having given up on Jesus and the saints), but finds he must claw his way to America and manage his own quest to lose his...
10) What We All Need
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What do all humans need, besides the food, shelter, peace, love, laughter, freedom, and perhaps some "loving early in the morning"? What We All Need combines sex, humor, and anti-war satire with a host of other subjects, //such as Indonesian love, Bill Clinton's famous endowments, which made into the Congressional Record as none preceding it, and chemical slavery of humans to substances to which they become addicted , which in this case is just a...
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Nuns, Jesuits, red meat, and an Indian Catholic minority mingle with mouthwatering Indian cuisine and universal childhood emotions such as motherlove, fear of abandonment, curiosity, and desire in this unique novel set entirely in India. So do puberty, adolescence, and the awakening of a repressed mind, clamoring for justice and truth. The result is a blend of "Angela's Ashes", "Catcher in the Rye", and "Portnoy's Complaint", one that has been described...