Human passions in Kurosawa’s Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s enduring international appeal is in part due to the remarkable personalities he had invented.
2w ago
The Precious O
That split second when the rubber slaps your skin and stays, when there is a click of a switch, a levitation, a lightness of your body—everyone remembers the first time they are knocked out, everyone except Mr Suleyman Khar, regional light-heavyweight titleist,
4w ago
Meditations on sanity in ‘Hospital’
Though on its surface Sanya Rushdi’s Hospital, translated into English by Arunava Sinha and recently longlisted for the 2024 Stella Prize, looks to be a breezy, short read—it is anything but. With her rather flattened, sparse prose, Rushdi has managed to write an enduring piece of autofiction, a compelling account of psychosis that neither sensationalises nor withers away any sentimentality from the struggles of mental health.
1m ago
The enchanting realism in Shahaduz Zaman’s ‘The Mynah Bird’s Testimony’
Shahaduz Zaman is a familiar face in Bangladeshi literature, whose literary career spans decades of fruitful work. He regularly writes columns for Bangla newspapers, has written a few notable biographical fiction, such as Ekjon Komolalebu (Prothoma, 2017), based around the life of Jibanananda Das, and has garnered some duly needed appreciation for ethnographic work on the history of medicine during the liberation war.
3m ago
Jhumpa Lahiri’s Italian renovations
Jhumpa Lahiri has always been the rare author whose prowess in the art of the short-story far surpassed her novelistic talents.
4m ago
The futuristic post-punk world of Izumi Suzuki
More than anything, Suzuki shows that the key to being an alien is not to be outlandish but to be sickeningly more human.
5m ago
Despair and death in ‘Truth or Dare’
Bangladeshi literature in English has had a considerably late start compared to its South Asian counterparts in India and Pakistan. A few exceptions aside, a consistency came to be seen only by the early 2010s.
5m ago
September 19, 2023
The records of resilience
Much of the reminiscences in The Murti Boys encompass the grittiness of staving off the Pakistanis with little weaponry and a great deal of quick thinking.
September 14, 2023
The occult thrills of ‘The Centre’
Rarely does a book arrive, a debut no less, that feels as inventive and accomplished as Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi’s The Centre. Her novel is built on the crossroads of interpretation and ownership, of the power of language and of those privileged enough to reclaim it.
August 28, 2023
The minority report in India
In Another India, Pratinav Anil unambiguously faults Nehruvian secularism—the very mantle championed by historians such as Mushirul Hasan for whom “the congress best represented the Muslim interests from the fifties on.”
August 10, 2023
The straight and narrow vision of ‘Crook Manifesto’
Colson Whitehead’s sequel to his novel Harlem Shuffle (Doubleday, 2021) is a continuation of the exact same order.
July 5, 2023
The pirates of Madagascar
In this posthumous effort, 'Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia' (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), Graeber posits, in characteristic fashion, that the Enlightenment would not have happened if not for the pirates around the Malagasy coast.
June 19, 2023
Cormac McCarthy: A great American novelist
For a nation that cannot boast of a Cervantes or Rabindranath, there will always be a need to find an All-American, a unifier who assures them of their place in the hallowed halls of literature. Cormac McCarthy, more than any other writer of his generation, was equipped to shoulder that title.
June 3, 2023
Like father, unlike son: Martin Amis’s place in literature
Perhaps Martin Amis’s works do not grab me for the most part because it veers too far away from the humanism of, say, Saul Bellow—a writer Martin greatly admires and has written about extensively.
April 6, 2023
Love and caste collide in Perumal Murugan’s 'Pyre'
It is the story of young lovers, Kumaresan and Saroja, who get secretly married and run away to Kumaresan’s village to start a new life. Murugan has written before about the intricate tragedies of domestic life and how they bring about the worst of our community.
January 26, 2023
On Prince Harry's memoir: Spare us the drivel, please
Harry’s dig at the paparazzi is the underlying theme of his life-story.
January 19, 2023
To be human for the corporation: Olga Ravn’s ‘The Employees’
These characters, human and machine alike, are invited to provide witness statements about their working environment to a commission, which form the entirety of the novel—a design that helps Ravn bring about an atmosphere of tension.
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