The Quiet Rebellion: On Hope, Despair, and How the 21st-Century Novel Offers a Way Out

Looking for your next powerful read? Discover how Elif Shafak’s There Are Rivers in the Sky, Tahmima Anam’s Uprising, and Carolina Pihelgas’s The Cut Line offer hope in a world defined by chaos and instability. Continue reading The Quiet Rebellion: On Hope, Despair, and How the 21st-Century Novel Offers a Way Out

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Dear Europe: I Promise I’m Not Staying (On Having a Turkish Passport & Nazlı Koca’s Novel The Applicant)

Sure, I had the privilege of choosing to leave my homeland, but how much of that choice was really mine to begin with? Continue reading Dear Europe: I Promise I’m Not Staying (On Having a Turkish Passport & Nazlı Koca’s Novel The Applicant)

Decolonizing History & Reclaiming the Narrative: Leila Aboulela’s River Spirit

What is not to love about a postcolonial novel that complicates the concepts of “victory” and “heroism,” inviting questions about whose victory, whose hero, and whose version of events–whose (hi)story is being told? Continue reading Decolonizing History & Reclaiming the Narrative: Leila Aboulela’s River Spirit

“Ravens, Cream, solitude, sublimity”: Virginia Woolf on Literature & Inner Peace

How many of us, “congenial spirits” are left out there, as Woolf writes in The Voyage Out (1915), “feel[ing] intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.” Continue reading “Ravens, Cream, solitude, sublimity”: Virginia Woolf on Literature & Inner Peace

In Search of Silence & a Life Worth Living: Etel Adnan’s Shifting the Silence

‘Shifting the Silence’ is raw and elusive, like the very reflection you’re reading here, but it will urge you to confront the incomprehensible. Continue reading In Search of Silence & a Life Worth Living: Etel Adnan’s Shifting the Silence

Finding Beauty ‘In Our Times of Greatest Love and Greatest Fear’: The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri

Lefteri approaches her characters’ vulnerability in such a gentle, graceful way that the novel feels heart-warming and hopeful despite the horrifying reality millions of people worldwide face today. Continue reading Finding Beauty ‘In Our Times of Greatest Love and Greatest Fear’: The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri