Amardeep Singh did his Ph.D. at Duke University, and currently teaches 20th century world literature at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He has published articles in several scholarly journals, and his book, Literary Secularism, is going to be published by Cambridge Scholarly Press in the fall of 2006. He currently keeps a blog devoted to literature called, simply, "Amardeep Singh," though he also contributes to two group blogs, "The Valve" and "Sepia Mutiny".

India's classical literature is full of fantastic stories -- one thinks of the monkey God Hanuman, who does battle with many-headed demon Ravana in the Ramayana -- but in modern Indian literature the tradition of bigger-than-life imaginative storytelling has been sometimes overlooked. Actually, speculative fiction, or SF, has been around for a while in modern Indian literature, as a vibrant countercultural cousin to "mainstream," literary fiction writing. Two particularly exciting new writers have been publishing books -- most of them now available in the U.S. -- and they deserve to better known among SF readers. Their names are Ashok K. Banker (the six-book Ramayana series) and Rana Dasgupta (Tokyo Cancelled).

(Source: SFRevu.com)