When I was in college, my friends and I would pass around romance novels to each other on the sly, hoping our English teachers wouldn’t spot us reading these juicy novels and give us a hard time. Romance novels were generally considered trashy although no teacher expressly told us not to read them. They were...

In recent development, being a “nerd” is cool again, but the original nerds never cared about the fashion statement of the word anyway. Answer our questions and we’ll tell who you relate as the cool nerd in the literary universe.

An excerpt from a conversation between Mahasweta Devi and her publisher Naveen Kishore, at Mahasweta Devi's home in Kolkata, on September 10, 2002.