What does desire smell like? For the poets of Kolkata, it may once have smelled of bela flowers, devotion or a monsoon-soaked ...

Philip hadn’t just presented Jin with a surprising new wish to have a child; he’d also been struggling to indulge one of her emergent longings. “Philip, I wish you’d hurt me,” she says early in the ...

Miranda Popkey’s début novel, “Topics of Conversation,” opens in Italy, in 2000. The unnamed narrator, twenty-one and set to begin graduate coursework in the fall, has been brought along on a wealthy ...

R.O. Kwon's latest novel "Exhibit" centers on a photographer, an injured ballerina, and their instantaneous — and intense — relationship. She speaks to NPR's Ayesha Rascoe about desire and taboos. In ...

The novel follows an Indian sociology professor who, tired of the rote scripts of “respectable” decline, announces she will hold a swayamvara on her 55th birthday in Seattle: a public, ritualised ...