Category: BOOKS


  • โ€œThere are some things that canโ€™t be explained in this life,โ€ Menshiki went on, โ€œand some others that probably shouldnโ€™t be explained. Especially when putting them into words ignores what is most crucial.โ€ ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  โ€”Haruki Murakami,…

  • It is not how the world is that is mystical, but that it is.ย ย ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย  ย ๏ผLudwig Wittgenstein This book is the…

  • Everything was real; inconceivably real, infinitely dear. These and all things started as nothing, latent within a vast energy-broth, but then we named them, and loved them, and, in this way, brought them forth. And now we must lose them. Abraham Lincoln repeatedly visited the graveyard where his son Willie, who died at the age…

  • The Meadow

    The Meadow tracks a decade-and-a-half old, but still haunting, story. The book is essentially an unravelling of the brutal 1995 kidnapping of six foreign tourists (two Britons, two Americans, one German and one Norwegian) which, some believe, changed the face of modern terrorism and, in a convoluted kind of way, paved the way for the…

  • โ€œAnything can happen. Here can be there, then can be now, up can be down, truth can be lies. Everythingโ€™s slip-sliding around and thereโ€™s nothing to hold on to. The whole thing has come apart at the seams.โ€ Published in two parts, 1605 and 1615, Don Quixote remains the most influential work of literature from the Spanish…

  • From Narrative to Myth

    Most people encounter Rabiโ€˜a through poetic aphorisms such as the following: โ€œI carry a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other: with these things I am going to set fire to Heaven and put out the flames in Hell so that voyagers to God can rip the veils and see…

  • โ€œMy mother has not stopped talking about it.โ€ โ€“ This is how Meena Kandasamy begins her soaring poem of a novel titled โ€œWhen I Hit You Or, a Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wifeโ€. At around 250 pages, the partially-autobiographical narrative is written in the first person and along with being a chronicle…

  • Beneath the modern metropolitan Delhi of today lie the remains of a royal Dehli which survived centuries. Rana Safvi, in her book, City of my Heart, digs up and translates some fragments of an era which could be attributed as magnanimous, more so, a golden period in the history of the Indian subcontinent. This book…

  • โ€œIn the first minute following her death, Tequila Leilaโ€™s consciousness began to ebb, slowly and steadily, like a tide receding from the shore.โ€ In May of this year, Turkish prosecutors launched an investigation into Elif Shafakโ€™s novels, particularly The Gaze (1999) and Three Daughters of Eve (2016), for charges of obscenity and promoting child abuse.…

  • Throughout history, there are numerous examples of how the divide-and-conquer tactic has been used as a precursor to total destruction. We know that much of the science of anthropology was born in genocide โ€“ to meet the need of their empires to understand a people, and ultimately to destroy them. I think this is perhaps…