The launch at Crossword, Kemps Corner, this Wednesday, will reveal a slim book that’s a good read. Most pieces are lucid with light, sometimes bleak and thought-provoking pieces by writers like Shubra Gupta, Ashok Malik, Joan Pinto, Sankar Sridhar, Kriti Sharma, Shankar Sharma and Jahnavi Barua, to name a few.

Gupta’s humorous essay is about her experience of 20 years of writing on cinema. “It’s called Can’t Please Anyone and talks of the travails of being a film critic. Usually if you’re totally honest you tend to lose friends,” says Gupta convivially.

Since quite a few of the writers are not real first-timers there is none of the butterflies that usually accompany the release of a first book, however, “Getting published by Penguin is always a pleasure,” adds published author Malik.

Others like Sridhar, whose piece delves into the vast nothingness of Ladakh, are seeing their name on a book for the first time. “It took seven months before I could actually celebrate since I did not bother calling the publishers once I sent in my piece,” says the 30-year-old who has been writing for newspapers and travelogues.

Sharma’s piece is on being a waiter in a dodgy Indian restaurant in Scotland. Malik muses over his experiences in DC with an Ethiopian cabbie, while we get a good dose of black humour in ex-civil servant Palden Gyalsten’s Musings on a Mobike.

A much more sombre note, like the relentlessly dark and brooding Jahnavi Barua’s Next Door, marks the fiction section. “Most of my inspiration comes from semi-rural environs of Assam. Given the subject, my writing varies from dark to more optimistic,” says the 40-year-old retired doctor who prefers short stories to the novel.

The twilight zones of nostalgia are teased out in Joan Pinto’s The Saint of Lost Things. The poetry is refreshing, to say the least, with writers like the 16-year-old Sarnan bringing a fresh sensibility to tried and tested verse.