Authors
New Lights: Gary Shteyngart, Akhil Sharma, Olga Grushin
Known Knowns
UK: Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage), William Shakespeare, Bronte sisters, Alexander Mccall Smith, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling (Kim), George Orwell (Homage to Catalonia), Kazuo Ishiguro, Graham Greene, John le Carré, D. H. Lawrence, Rebecca West, V.S. Naipaul, E. M. Forster
Russian: Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nicholai Gogol, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Nabokov, Vladimir Mayakovsky
US: Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Kurt Vonnegut, Theodore Dreiser, David Remnick, Henry James, Maya Angelou, John Cheever, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Charles Dickinson
Latin America: Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Isabel Allende, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges
Indian: Salman Rushdie (now UK), Ved Mehta (now US), Rabindranath Tagore, R.K. Narayanan, Amartya Sen (now US), Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (now US), Anita Desai (In Custody), Mahadevi Varma, Saadat Hasan Manto (eventually Pakistan)
The rest: Naguib Mahfouz, Orhan Pamuk, Abdelrahman Munif, Albert Camus, J.M. Coetzee, Doris Lessing, Thomas Mann, Johann Goethe, Gunter Grass, James Joyce (Dubliners), Camilo José Cela, Alice Munro, Franz Kafka
Non Fiction: Ludwig Wittgenstein, David Remnick, Robert Fisk, Michael Taussig, Ben Orlove, Noam Chomsky, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Michael Schudson, Shanto Iyengar, Anthony Lewis, Orlando Figes, Charles Clover, Nelson Polsby, Donald Kinder, Amartya Sen (Poverty and Famines), Jay Epstein (News from Nowhere)
Graphical Novel: Art Spiegelman (Maus), Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince)
Children’s Books: Maurice Sendak (Where the wild things are)
Artists
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Johannes Vermeer, Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, Henri Matisse, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Francisco Goya, Edgar Degas, Diego Velázquez, John Singer Sargent, Edward Hopper, Tiziano Vecelli (Titian), Andy Warhol
Contemporary Artists: Saira Wasim, Brian Jungen, Ashok Sukumaran, Damien Hirst, Banksy, Gerhard Richter, Marcel Duchamp
Music:
Gotan Project, Amy Winehouse, Norah Jones, Ali Farka Toure, Cheb Khaled, Nusrat Fateh Ali, J.S. Bach, Mohammed Rafi, Celia Cruz, Lauren Hill, Fela Kuti, Lynda Lymay, Alain Souchon
Movies:
Ikiru, Raise the Red Lantern, Raging Bull, Reservoir Dogs, Lawrence of Arabia, ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto!!, Gosford Park, 28 Days Later, Bourne Identity, Station Agent, Before Sunset, Apocalypse Now, In Custody, Shakespeare Wallah, A Clockwork Orange, Dr. Strangelove, Little Miss Sunshine, The Battle of Algiers, Motorcycle Diaries, The Secret of the Grain, Chungking Express, Grapes of Wrath (John Ford)
Indian: Umrao Jaan, Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro, Shatranj Ke Khilari, Saraansh, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, Gol Maal, Bawarchi, Anand, Silsila, Gaman, Pyaasa, Ankur, Omkara, Maqbool
Directors and Producers Merchant-Ivory Productions, Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman, Kar Wai Wong, Zhang Yimou, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Alfonso Cuaron, Terrence Mallick, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Shyam Benegal, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Werner Herzog, Danny Boyle, Muzaffar Ali, Vishal Bharadwaj
Actors Emma Thompson
Stay away from-
Vikram Seth: A suitable boy – a bureaucratic novel, charmless, inane
Zadie Smith: On Beauty: Easy efficient caricatures
Jhumpa Lahiri: Mediocre intellect, remarkably shallow