Beginning to read Fine Gråbøl’s What Kingdom, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitkin, is like sitting in a silent room, alone, and a voice begins to speak as though from beside you.
Izumi Suzuki was little known outside of Japan during her short lifetime. The Japanese author and actress had remained a cult figure most of her life.
From A Handmaid’s Tale (McClelland and Stewart, 1985) to The Hunger Games (Scholastic, 2008),
Obayed Haq’s Bangla novel, Arkathi, is almost a bildungsroman tale filled with adventure and self-reflection. In true bildungsroman fashion, where the protagonist progresses into adulthood with room for growth and change, a bulk of Haq’s novel talks about the spiritual journey that an orphan, Naren, takes through a forest in order to mature, and comes out on the other side to realise a community’s deep, hidden truth.
The city of Prague, now the capital of the Czech Republic, was once the breeding hotspot of the 20th century’s greatest writers, scientists, scholars, and activists.
Everett’s breezy, fast-moving retelling of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) is about putting in some due respect.
Speaking of Gilmore Girls, the first addition to our list is a hearty romantic novel by Laurie Gilmore. This book is a written rendition of Stars Hollow itself—starting from the quirky characters to its eternally golden atmosphere.
Happy Hour greeted me like a warm hug. This is definitely one of the sweetest books I’ve read this year, and possibly one of the sweetest books I will ever read.
There is something to be said about the innate process of otherising a person with disability, and pushing them out of the group of the ‘norm’ and into the group of the ‘exception’.
The title of this book suggests that it is based in Bengal but it really meanders deftly across time and space, more often than not in “mazy motion”.
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.
In Deena Mohamed’s Shubeik Lubeik (originally published in 2015 and translated in 2023 by Mohamed herself), wishes have not only drastically altered the fabric of daily life in Egypt, but the world at large.
Set in 1979, this is a story of monsters—the ones who prey on the vulnerable, the ones that exploit our weaknesses, and the ones that we elevate to positions of power.
The craze that once prevailed in academia over postcolonialism no longer seems to hover around there anymore.
Dense textbooks with words more twisted than the shapes my lips could contort themselves into—for the longest time, my perception of non-fiction didn’t deviate from this singular image.
Reading this book was uncomfortable, like a car crash waiting to happen, it was hard to read and even harder to put down.
It’s been a while since I had been meaning to get my hands on a book by Shashi Tharoor, and when my sister asked me what she could get me from Kolkata, I immediately said I’d love to read a book by the renowned Indian author, politician, columnist, and critic.
As a Palestinian-Australian, you’ve stressed the importance of telling stories about everyday Palestinians. Why is it important to tell such stories?
Like many veterans, I joined a creative writing MFA program because I wanted to evolve as a writer.
