Now up on
Amazon, for
Nook and on Lulu, with iBooks, and other outlets/formats coming soon, a short essay in words and pictures on the temples of Tamil Nadu, South India, and the world they grow out of. Here's the blurb:
The land of temples is South India, the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent. It's been called the last surviving classical civilization, a land where there is room for temples large and small and time for rituals passed down for millennia. In four brief essays and two dozen evocative black-and-white photographs scholar and devotee Michael Steinberg takes readers into the inner sanctuaries of ancient temples and out again into the teeming streets of contemporary Chennai. A big book in a little package, his deeply personal story also sheds light on the enduring importance of a way of life that has its roots in the dawn of civilization itself.
I'm the author of
The Fiction of a Thinkable World: Body, Meaning, and the Culture of Capitalism (Monthly Review Press, 2005) and
A New Biology of Religion: Spiritual Practice and the Life of the Body (Praeger, forthcoming), but this is my first ebook and my first foray into self-publishing. I'd appreciate it if someone could tell me how the images look on a Kindle screen. (I already know they look lovely on an iPad.) And of course I'd be grateful for any reviews (good ones, naturally!) and any word-of-mount publicity.
Thanks!