The square in front of the Kasbah in Chefchaouen comes alive in the evenings. As I arrived in the little-known Moroccan hillside town with my parents that afternoon, I had taken a quick look around the square, known to the locals as the Outa Hammam. Most shop fronts were drawn
Novelist, editor, journalist, teacher---Jerry Pinto has answered to many callings, and they all seem to slip into the canvas of his fiction. He brings in the rumination of the average city dweller and elevates it into wisdom. There’s an earnest attempt to challenge conservatism, especially notions that rip personal
Immoderate Men is a collection of short stories that explore the households and streets of post-partition to modern day Bengal. Written by an author who goes by the pseudonym Shikandin, the book contains 11 stories, each different in style, approach and content. As the name of the book indicates, all
A Book of Light, a collection of stories about living with someone with a mental illness or infirmity, edited by Jerry Pinto, allows us to look into the inner lives of families in which one or more members have a ‘different mind’, and the upheaval that causes in the lives
Laksmi Pamuntjak's debut novel Amba: The Question of Red is an ambitious work. An adaptation of the Amba-Bhishma-Salwa episode from the Mahabharata, it is set in the Indonesia of the ’60s and the ’70s, and then the late 2000s, chronicling this turbulent time in Indonesia’s history. In
Six decades after his death, Saadat Hasan Manto continues to haunt us with an uncanny fascination. There is a spurt of literary and cinematic interest in the life and works of one of the strongest literary voices of the subcontinent. Able translators are making his works accessible to the English
Sharanya Manivannan weaves a rich tapestry with the fine threads of love in her newly released book of short fiction titled The High Priestess Never Marries. The love that permeates these pages is a difficult one. Here, the self is the only constant, longing and heartbreak unearth discomfiting vulnerability, and
With inputs by Sharon IraniFirst Hand, a graphic non-fiction anthology, is a work of narrative density, comprising 22 stories from a diverse selection of researchers, journalists, filmmakers, designers, anthropologists, and academicians, which are then further presented in the six sub-genres of Oral History, Autobiography, Commentary, Reportage, Biography, and Documentary. While
On a particularly sunny morning in Bandra, I woke up one day to a phone call from my mother. She and I conversed in our native language, Tamil. After a hasty breakfast, I left for a meeting. Almost at my destination, I was lost, and I asked a security guard
New husbands are like burrs: they stick, they irritate, and they’re mostly unwanted. Mine turns to me and says, "Do you know that Gangtok is the only part of our country from where you can see another country?" He beams at me as though I’m a
Powerful art and conflict have had a long history of courtship. Take, for example, Maus by Art Spiegelman, Palestine by Joe Sacco, or Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, the genre-defining graphic novels that gave rise to this form of visceral documentation. Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir by Malik Sajad (Purchase) My
There is a certain sense of trepidation and intrigue that grips you almost instantly when you begin reading Black Mumba. A crowdfunded noir graphic novel created and written by Ram Venkatesan (author of the Aghori series), Black Mumba is characterised by swathes of ink and layered narratives that showcase a