The uber-cool book store is here

The new Landmark is big and attractive, but it does not compromise on the store’s eclectic edge

You go to Landmark when you know it’s just about time for the new Alice Sebold to arrive in India or when, after reading the Lounge column Cult Fiction, you want to get your hands on AbsoluteWatchmen. No book store in Mumbai—perhaps even in India—can match Landmark’s eclectic collection of literary fiction and graphic novels. It has been the zany, cool intellectual’s destination.

But the store in Andheri is also a mini retail paradise—the latest Hidesign bag as easily visible to shoppers as the new Yann Martel or David Mitchell cover. You have to negotiate screaming children and heavy plastic bags hanging from tired hands to make your way to the books section of the store in order to unearth the best. Like most big book-store chains across the world, Landmark believes a family has different kinds of shoppers and the bibliophile (nerd) will only shop at Landmark if the entire family gets to shop there too.

At the new Landmark in Palladium, Phoenix Mills, in central Mumbai, there is enough space and shelf for all kinds. The 42,000 sq. ft store, sprawled across the basement of Palladium, stocks at least 5% more in all categories than the other store in Mumbai—and all the 14 other stand-alone outlets in India.

Full report here Mint

Jeffrey Archer on his Indian love story

English author Lord Jeffrey Archer loves India with all of his heart, but knows he'll never write a broad sweeping novel set in the subcontinent.

"To write about India like that, I think you have to be here from day zero. You have to feel it. You have to be born here," he explained on Tuesday night, at the grand opening of the new Landmark bookstore at the Palladium Mall in Lower Parel, Mumbai.

He was also quick to acknowledge, with great humility, that India loves him back. Indeed, his book Kane and Abel remains a best-seller here, 30 years after its release.

But Archer also advised his Indian fans to explore their own rich literature, pointing to the works of Vikram Seth and RK Narayan.

Full report here Rediff

India is now an international country: Archer

On A visit to Mumbai to inaugurate the country’s largest bookstore — Landmark — author Jeffrey Archer said: “The fact that India has invited a British author to inaugurate the country’s biggest book store proves that India is very much an international country now.”

The author of Kane & Abel and A Prisoner of Birth says the country’s youth reads well and is not influenced by the TV and internet. Advising aspiring writers, Lord Archer told ET: “It takes me around 1,000 hours of hard work and energy to write a single book. If anyone wants to write a book, one should read books. Great writing evolves from great reading.”

Lord Archer, who has also been an MP, says India has a great appetite for reading good literature. “Indians are basically story lovers, just like the Irish. They like stories where it should have a beginning, a middle and an end. If possible, it should have a twist also. Malgudi Days is the best example of that.”

Full report here Economic Times

A place for reading, listening and gaming

Miniaturisation has been a key trend over the last two decades — huge ghetto blasters have given way to thumb-sized MP3 players, there’s absolutely nothing in the FMCG space that you can’t buy in a sachet and large bookstore chains have tried to cram themselves into little corners and holes in the wall.

It’s heartening then to step into the latest Landmark store in Mumbai at Lower Parel, scheduled to open officially on May 4. At a massive 42,000 square feet, it is the largest Landmark outlet anywhere in the country. It stands at nearly thrice the size of the book and music retail chain’s first store in Mumbai.

It has allowed Landmark to introduce many different aspects that were previously out of bounds. Prominent among these are the gaming zone, a lounge-like area where the latest videogames and consoles can be tested; a photo unit in association with HP to print pictures taken on digital cameras or mobile phones; a vastly expanded children’s section and what seems almost quixotic in this day of declining CD sales — a large music section.

Full report here Economic Times

What Indians can’t write–and why

There are three kinds of fiction that Indian writers can’t write: good crime thrillers, good romance (adult kind, in which sex is not “lofty breasts” and “stars in the sky”) and fiction for young adults. So that leaves us readers with literary fiction, pulp fiction and of course, the ubiquitous campus novel. By the way, a really cool crime title which Hachette India is publishing is by Lounge columnist, the more Bangalorean-and-less-Swedish writer Zac O’Yeah. His book ‘Scandanavistan’ is a spy thriller set in a futuristic Europe colonized by India!

When  I last visited my favourite bookstore Landmark (finally, Landmark opens this side of town, in Lower Parel), Martin Amis, Susan Sontag and Vikram Seth sat alongside each other in the literary fiction shelves. The new releases section had a dizzying variety of books. There was no separate section for cime, but in popular fiction, there was Swedish fiction, Raymond Chandler and John Le Carre. The only Indian authors here was Kalpish Ratna—they never got to me although their crime stories are soaked in very local Bombay flavours.

There was no category for young adults. In the children’s books section, there was the phenomenally successful ‘Twilight’ series and the usual sci-fi and fantasy titles. What do teenagers and young adults who don’t like sci-fi or fantasy or love stories revolving handsome vampires, read?

Full report here Mint

A question of identity

Aatish Taseer's debut novel The Temple Goers talks about belonging, corruption, power, and more…

Just the author with his book on the stage, and a smattering of silent listeners. That was the scene at the launch of Aatish Taseer's debut novel The Temple Goers at Landmark, where for close to three-quarters of an hour, the author simply sat and read long, descriptive passages from his book.

No interaction or discussion on the themes of the novel with a Chennai personality. No chatty interludes by the author himself. Even the post-reading audience interaction was brief, with the author not really going out of his way to engage the admittedly sparse audience.

Relaxed reading
It made for a rather subdued event (unusually so for a Landmark reading). But what it did do — and one might argue this is after all the point of any book reading — is give that small group of listeners a clear feel for the prose itself — emotional, and vividly evocative of the many facets of Delhi. The relaxed reading of unbroken segments from the novel allowed one to get under the skin of The Temple Goers, feeling the narrator's urgency, for instance, as he searches for the old poet, Zafar Moradabadi, and seeing Old Delhi — in all its decaying magnificence — come alive through his eyes.

Full report here Hindu