Tiger benign. In the Hindu epic Mahabharata, tigers are fiercer and more ruthless than lions. The tiger's tail appears in stories from countries including China and Korea, it being generally inadvisable to grasp a tiger by the tail. In William Blake's poem in the "Songs of Experience", titled "The Tyger," the tiger is a menacing and fearful animal. In Yann Martel's 2001 Man Booker Prize winning novel "Life of Pi", the protagonist, surviving shipwreck for months in a small boat, somehow avoids being eaten by the other survivor, a large Bengal tiger. The story was adapted in Ang Lee's 2012 feature
Self (novel) as "crude confusion", while "The Hindu" described the book as "interesting ideas juxtaposed against not-so-inspiring writing". Martel received in 1991 a grant of $18,000 from the Canada Council to write "Self", which was published in Canada in 1996, with a British launch the same November. Self (novel) Self is a novel by Yann Martel. It tells the story of a traveling writer who wakes up one morning to discover that he has become a woman. It was first published by Knopf Canada in 1996. The narrator, at first male, explains various events from his early childhood, living with a traveling