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The Blog of Cafe Dissensus Magazine – we DISSENT

Posts tagged ‘Authors’

A conversation on craft with author Sucharita Dutta-Asane

By Varsha Tiwary
The stories in Sucharita’s collection, Cast Out and Other Stories, pull you into their world with a shiver of recognition. They explore the world that lies beneath the fact ridden headlines that shock and then numb every Indian. The characters belong to the world of the forgotten, the overlooked, the ones buried in history, mythology, memory. They ask difficult questions, without falling in the trap of giving easy answers. 

A conversation with author, Nazia Erum

By Mohammad Farhan
If we can’t handle discussing sex or sexual abuse, then how will we handle cases of misogyny, homophobia, casteism and in the last decade or so the rise of Islamophobia, which has certainly moved from our drawing rooms to the classrooms and school corridors?

An interview with author, Prayaag Akbar

By Michelle D’costa
Prayaag Akbar is the author of Leila, an award-winning novel that Netflix is now developing into a series. It will be published in the UK and much of the English-speaking world in July 2018. He is a consulting editor at Mint. On April 20, 2018, Leila completed a year. In this interview we discuss his book primarily.

Book Review: Torsa Ghosal’s ‘Open Couplets’

By Sourya Chowdhury
Ghosal’s novel uses the quest motif as a catalyst. The main plot revolves around ethnographer Ira Chatterjee embarking on parallel journeys to locate two very different artists. However, it is difficult to sum up a work that relies so heavily on the reader’s participation; the text is ingrained in a postmodern universe where meaning is always contingent and protean.

Book Review: Sumana Roy’s ‘How I Became a Tree’

By Bhaswati Ghosh
She returns to Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s forest-centred novel Aranyak to unearth the mystery of man’s tense relationship with the forest. It is at once a place for finding repose as it is a resource to be exploited. Staying inside a forest all by herself enables Roy to experience the communality of trees, their shunning of individual prominence.

Book Review: Khalid Mir’s ‘Jaffna Street: Tales of Life, Death, Betrayal and Survival in Kashmir’

By Adil Bhat
In building the narrative around Noor’s character, Mir opens up the window to his mind and thoughts that is both narrow and has complete disregard for the life of a Kashmiri, which appears simplistic from the outside, but is otherwise dense and located in politics. A subjective account of a protracted conflict, Khalid’s book lacks nuance and depth.

Book Review: Chandramohan S’ ‘Letters to Namdeo Dhasal’

By Rochelle Potkar
I have read an average amount of poetry, much less Dalit literature, but the other poet who comes to mind when reading Chandramohan is Meena Kandasamy. I won’t compare their poetry, because we need voices as strong as these and more to make for a compelling discourse that can affect the shifting of mindsets, and thence physical milieus and manifestations.