Prakash Kona

Pearls of an Unstrung Necklace Prakash Kona

A connected series of vignettes creating not just a story but a state of being. Beginning in love and culminating in the changes of the body in pregnancy, this utterly moving work is poetry, philosophy, and, with inessentials stripped away, the emotional heart of the art of fiction. Consisting of sixty-two brief, 2- or 3-page visions, the book presents us with a narrator imperceptibly changing from the male lover into the female beloved. Along the way we find ourselves awash in philosophy, poetry, emotion and perception. Kona deals in the most down-to-earth images--rice, red pepper, the tip of a pencil--and at the same time in the most general states of being--paradox, amnesia, separation, love. The fluidity of his mind, the freedom with which he crosses boundaries, is always in the service of an ideal view of mankind, one that sees the emotional and true-hearted creatures we could be, and simply becomes that ideal in the course of writing. In writing a book about love, Kona shows a mirror to the love in all of us. About the Author Prakash Kona lives in Hyderabad, India. He is the author of one previous novel, Streets that Smell of Dying Roses; a work of theory, Literary Criticism: A Study in Pluralism, available from Wisdom House Publications; and two books of poetry published by Writer's Workshop, Calcutta. He completed his doctoral studies with a comparative study of Chomsky, Derrida and Wittgenstein at the University of Mississippi, Oxford, MS. He has recently returned to Hyderabad after a stint as assistant professor of English Literature and Humanities at Eastern Mediterranean University in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. Prakash believes in, among other things, the power of alternate discourses and the ideal of a classless society.