JAIPUR JOURNALS - Namita Gokhale

A brilliant, funny, and moving account of the characters that make festivals tick. There are the authors enjoying moments of adulation after years of creative isolation and the star-struck public allowed to mingle with their cultural icons. And those in-between who are both author and fan as is the case of Rudrani Rana, who attends one festival session after the other clutching a canvas bag which contains the labour of her life - an unsubmitted manuscript written and re-written until only the sentence ''my body is a haunted house'' remains untouched. Partly a love letter to one of the great literary shows on earth, partly a satire about the glittery set that throngs this literary venue year in year out, and partly an ode to the millions of aspiring writers who inhabit literary festivals, Jaipur Journals provides incisive insights  into the heart of a literary festival.