Book Review: Gita Viswanath’s ‘Twice It Happened’
By Narasimha Murthy
While the narration turns lethargic towards the end of the novel, Gita Viswanath’s Twice It Happened is a bold novel that keeps its readers in its thrall.
Book Review: Asif Khan’s ‘Prisoners of Paradise’
By Arbeena
The story beautifully depicts the life in a curfew-laden valley where people are caged inside their homes.
Book review: Paulo Coelho’s ‘Eleven Minutes’
By Asif Khan
The author hasn’t said anything new about the philosophy of life, though this book gives such an impression at the beginning.
A Review of Bhaskaranand Jha Bhaskar’a Two Collections of Poetry
By Nishi Pulugurtha
A reading of the poems in the two volumes reveals the poet working his way through metaphors that reveal his development and growth as a poet handling a myriad of subjects.
Book Review: Udayan Mukherjee’s novel, ‘Dark Circles’
By Vipasha Bhardwaj
Mukherjee has not spun a sentimental tale for the readers but only a realistic depiction of the trials and tribulations of a modern nuclear family. The story is loaded with guilt and disloyalty and the reverberations could be felt in the lives of Ronojoy and Sujoy.
Book Review: Edward Snowden’s ‘Permanent Record’
By Rashid Abbasi
The book is full of instances where Snowden unravels interesting information about how modern espionage works. For example, the sophistication in signal intelligence has made embassies a safe haven for espionage, where spies often disguise themselves as diplomats.
Book Review – Gowhar Geelani’s ‘Kashmir: Rage and Reason’
By Abid Ahmad Shah
The struggle of Kashmiris for political and economic rights, justice and dignity predates the birth of India and Pakistan. According to Geelani, it is important to contextualise and historicize the struggle of Kashmiris for independence which can be traced to the 16th century when it was taken over by the Mughals.
Book Review: Paresh Tiwari’s ‘Raindrops Chasing Raindrops: Haibun and Hybrid Poems’
By Poornima Laxmeshwar
The prose is sensuous. It holds the minds of the readers and also allows free wandering in imagination when needed. Sometimes it brings alive the touch, sometimes the visuals and at times even the taste. But aren’t poems supposed to tantalize, bring out undiscovered emotions and even surprise us at times?
Book Review: Nitin Sridhar’s ‘Menstruation Across Cultures: A Historical Perspective’
By Soma Mondal
By invoking and dedicating the book to women, it tries to invoke feminist favour for the subject he has undertaken. The book is anything but feminist as the author who is a Sanatana Dharma (Hindu eternal law) follower tries to provide a rationale for understanding and imbibing religious laws as the context for understanding menstruation.
The need for ‘Love After Babel’
By Chanchal Kumar
Love After Babel will be remembered as the prime example of a poet’s love letter to language, which can be a reluctant, unyielding beloved. Its appearance in our midst couldn’t have been timelier. We needed a Love After Babel to remind us why Dalit poetry has always been far superior to Brahmin-savarna’s, in other words, the mainstream’s attempts at writing verse, not that we had any doubt to begin with.
Book Review: Saubhik De Sarkar’s ‘The Evening Gnome: Selected Poems 1995-2017’
By Nishi Pulugurtha
The poems translated from the first volume speak of political alertness in a manner that seems to be ruthless. They voice hope, fear, sarcasm and doom along with destruction and death. Saubhik’s second volume took a long time in making and has poems that use place names and geography to speak of lived in reality of life.
The “radical middle” in ‘Post-Colonial Poems’: Reviewing Kamal Kumar Tanti’s poetry in translation
By Sabreen Ahmed
The river is a dominant imagery in the recent collection. The river acts as a symbolic repository of historical annals of slavery and hardship borne by his kinsmen from which there is no way of return. In the first poem “Death” from his award winning collection, Our Ancestor Marangburu, the trope of death and the river coexist as a corollary in a predestined inescapable existential closure.
Cafe Dissensus Everyday 