Vintage Pulp | May 28 2014 |
Above is the cover of an Indian crime magazine called Nutan Kahaniyan, showing a wild-eyed woman delivering a pretty firm message with a broken bottle, circa 1976. Crime magazines have long been popular in India. In fact, the writer Aravind Adiga explained in his great novel The White Tiger that today “rape and murder” magazines are sold in every newsstand in the country, and are particularly popular among poor servants. But he cautions the wealthy to remain calm—even though millions of servants are secretly thinking of murdering their bosses, violent magazines are an outlet for the urge. It’s when servants start reading Gandhi and the Buddha that the wealthy should commence pissing their pants. Today there is still a magazine in existence in India called Nutan Kahaniyan, but as far as we can tell it has nothing to do with the lurid version you see above. Anyway, this is a great little artifact from a country we rarely feature, and we love the cover. We’ll see if we can find more from India moving forward.
Modern Pulp | Oct 27 2010 |
Chennai, India-based Blaft Publications has followed up their acclaimed 2008 collection of Tamil pulp stories with a second volume, which they’ve called Tamil Pulp Fiction II. Original, untranslated copies of Pulp II have been available since April, but the first English copies are just hitting American bookstores this week. We haven’t read any of the stories, but we’re aware of how popular the genre is. In India, pulp paperbacks are sold at every newsstand in the country, along with the incredibly popular crime magazine Murder Weekly. Indian crime writers in general are becoming more recognized worldwide, led by Aravind Adiga, who won the Man Booker Prize in 2008 for his novel The White Tiger. You can learn more about Tamil Pulp Fiction II and read an excerpt at NPR, here.