NPR takes a gander at some sexy, gory fiction from India - Tamil pulp.
From the piece...
Forget The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo — Indumathi's Hold On A Minute I'm In The Middle of A Murder is coming to America. Here's a quote from this foreign best-seller:
"Suddenly a trickle of blood began to flow from a crack in the stone tomb. How could fresh blood come out of a tomb built in 1977?"
The story is part of a collection of Tamil pulp fiction that's been translated into English.
Tamil has always been the language of high culture in India. Its literature is 2000 years old, its poetry exquisite.
But some of the most widely read stories in Tamil have titles like Sweetheart, Please Die.
You see these books everywhere in India. The covers are lurid, mustachioed men menacing women in tight nurse's uniforms, knives dripping blood, and lots of cleavage. Rakesh Khanna, a Californian living in India, wanted to find out more about the stories. So he hired a translator. Now, they have put together Volume II of The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction.
A Journey Round My Skull has a gallery of some vintage Tamil pulp covers, here.
2 comments:
Actually those covers at Journey Round My Skull are Malayalam novels (a related but different language.) Here are some Tamil covers (from The Blaft Anthology): http://causticcovercritic.blogspot.com/2010/01/tamil-pulp.html
It's been corrected. Thanks for your help!
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