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 Mehr Afshan Farooqi’s book, Urdu Literary Culture: Vernacular Modernity in the Writing of Muhammad Hasan Askari, will be published simultaneously from Oxford University Press (for sale in South Asia) and in Palgrave-Macmillan’s prestigious series Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World. She is also the editor - contributor of The Two Sided Canvas, Perspectives on Ahmed Ali, forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2012.
 Robert Hueckstedt has recently translated Manohar Shyam Joshi's The Perplexity of Hariya Hercules from the Hindi. The translation was published by Penguin Books India in 2009. From the publisher:
"Harihar Datt Tiwari, better known as Hariya Hercules, is an infinitely patient man. He spends all his free time attending to his blind, infirm, chronically constipated father Girvan Datt Tiwari, who, before being afflicted withchronic bad luck, was a pillar of society. So when his father dies, Hariya, and everyone in the community, is stunned. Girvan Datt-ji leaves behind a trunk containing some jewellery and a clutch of pornographic pictures in which he is himself an active, enthusiastic participant. In the trunk, Hariya also finds a letter to hisfather from Lama Rigyang Cho of Lahaul-Spiti. The letter describes a curse Girvan has brought upon the Tiwari family by stealing the trunk from the deity of Goomalling, a mythical place somewhere in the Himalayas. Ever the dutiful son, Hariya goes looking for Goomalling to return the cursed object and mysteriously vanishes. After Hariya’s exit from the scene, the story of his journey, his motives and his perplexity becomes communal property and soon there are as many versions as there are people. But as the narrator tries to piece these accounts together, they continually shift and change, creating a dark, uncertain world of hearsay and half-truths. And Hariya becomes variouslya comic, tragic and, to many, even a noble figure. The Perplexity of Hariya Hercules establishes Manohar Shyam Joshi as one of the most outstanding writers of modern Hindi literature."
Bilal Maanaki is currently working on an Arabic- English and English-Arabic dictionary for the Oxford University Press. For this extensive project, Bilal is a part of an international team. The dictionary is scheduled to be published in 2013.
 Farzaneh Milani's new book, Words, Not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement, explores the legacy of sex segregation and its manifestations in Iranian literature and film and in notions of beauty and the erotics of passivity. Milani expands her argument beyond Iranian culture, arguing that freedom of movement is a theme that crosses frontiers and dissolves conventional distinctions of geography, history, and religion. She makes bold connections between veiling and foot binding, between Cinderella and Barbie, between the figures of the female Gypsy and the witch. In so doing, she challenges cultural hierarchies that divert attention from key issues in the control of women across the globe. Words Not Swords was published by Syracuse University Press in April 2011. Above information provided by the publisher.
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