Forget Kathmandu: An Elegy for Democracy

Author:

Manjushree Thapa

Publisher:

ALEPH BOOK COMPANY

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Publisher	ALEPH BOOK COMPANY
Publication Year	2013
ISBN-13	9789382277002
ISBN-10	9789382277002
Binding	Paperback
Number of Pages	304 Pages
Language	(English)
Dimensions (Cms)	12.7 x 1.73 x 20.32
Weight (grms)	331

In June 2001, the king of Nepal and almost his entire family were massacred. Unrest, simmering over the previous decade, boiled over and pushed the nation into free fall. In 2005, the dead kings brother reinstated monarchy, crushing any hope that parliamentary democracy would flourish in Nepal. A period fraught with uncertainty and intense turmoil ensued: the Maoists waged a bloody Peoples War; the monarchy mounted a bloodier counter-insurgency effort; political parties bickered and fought endlessly; and the citizens bore the brunt of it all. Wide-ranging in scope the book spans the beginning of the monarchy, through the early democratic movements, to the present Forget Kathmandu is many things: history, memoir, reportage, travelogue, analysis. But, above all, it is an unflinching, clear-sighted attempt to make sense of the bad politics that plagued and continues to plague the country. It remains as worryingly relevant to present-day Nepal as it was when first published in 2005

Manjushree Thapa

Manjushree Thapa grew up in Nepal, Canada and the United States. She began to write upon completing her BFA in photography at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her first book was Mustang Bhot in Fragments (1992). In 2001 she published the novel The Tutor of History, which she had begun as her MFA thesis in the creative writing program at the University of Washington in Seattle, which she attended as a Fulbright scholar. Her translation of Indra Bahadur Rai's there’s a Carnival Today won 2017 PEN America Heim Translation Grant. Her best known book is Forget Kathmandu: An Elegy for Democracy (2005), published just weeks before the royal coup in Nepal on 1 February 2005. The book was shortlisted for the Lettre Ulysses Award in 2006. After the publication of the book, Thapa left the country to write against the coup. In 2007 she published a short story collection, Tilled Earth. In 2009 she published a biography of a Nepali environmentalist: A Boy from Siklis: The Life and Times of Chandra Gurung. The following year she published a novel, Seasons of Flight. In 2011 she published a nonfiction collection, The Lives We Have Lost: Essays and Opinions on Nepal. Her latest book, published in South Asia in 2016, is a novel, All Of Us in Our Own Lives. She has also contributed op-eds to the New York Times.