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In 1954, a new magazine appeared out of Bombay with Nissim Ezekiel at its helm, titled Quest (“a quarterly of inquiry, criticism and ideas”) and it went on to live a respectable two decades and some, until Indira Gandhi’s emergency caused it to collapse. Quest was an intellectual rite of passage: many of the boldface names that light up newspapers, magazines, academic journals and even television screens today, first made their mark with a piece in here. The Best of Quest is a collection of some of the most striking essays, poems and stories to have appeared in the pages of the magazine. In an era not long past, Quest was the sign of the times. But such a sign and such a time it was that reading the magazine now is illuminating in an absolutely contemporary sense. Like its counterparts across the world – Transition in Africa, Encounter in the USA/UK, Quadrant in Australia, and its fellow publication, Imprint in India – Quest was ideologically free-wheeling and stood for “cultural freedom”, a term not free of complication, given the dirty tricks of the cold war. What endures from that era is this: a testament to a time when writers and readers were renaissance people; a time when independent thought reigned supreme.
ISBN - 9789380658803
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Pages : 694
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