Books

Between Pre-modern and Modern Times

Basharat Peer

The adventures of Musharraf Ali Farooqi, who quit his job as a journalist in Pakistan to work in a packaging factory in Toronto and then at a fast-food joint, and translated and wrote books late into the night

Meeting God after 10 Years

Murtaza Razvi

They had parted ways and made up again after his 28th birthday. Only, He was no longer the compassionate God he knew. An extract from the forthcoming novel, God’s Own Progeny, by Pakistani journalist Murtaza Razvi, who was found murdered at his home last week

The Lovey-Dovey Boys

Aastha Atray Banan

A bunch of young male writers has come to dominate India’s romance charts, once the preserve of female writers

The Writer’s Riyaaz

Sohini Chattopadhyay

Amit Chaudhuri on the death of the author-editor relationship, the boredom of being a novelist, and writing on his feet, literally

The Reader’s Writer

Jyotirmoy Talukdar

Tabish Khair on why he doesn’t write for critics, his dislike of the term ‘postcolonial’, and how journalism helped him overcome his dread of deadlines

A Spanking New Bestseller

Rosalyn D’Mello

This could have been a Mills & Boon novel, but for its sado-masochistic twist. So what is it about this cliché-ridden book that is driving women in hordes to read it?

The Subaltern Sings

Shruti Ravindran

Gogu Shyamala, a Dalit feminist and Telangana activist, writes captivating short stories about life in rural Andhra Pradesh

One Hundred Years of Good Girlitude

Saba Imtiaz

The lessons of Bahishti Zevar, advising Muslim women to defer to their husbands and never consider them their equals, are still popular with talk show hosts in Pakistan

When Something Works

Tabish Khair

As with her first collection of poems, Tishani Doshi’s best poems here are those in which a female experience, located boldly in the body, works as a comment on something larger