This is my third attempt to sit down and write an academic post on J.M. Coetzee’s 1999 novel Disgrace, and it gives me joy that I am not writing it. Continue reading Rilke, Joy, and a Spring Morning That Feels Like Fall
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
‘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
The value of In Quest of a Homeland for me lies in its honesty and contribution to, in historian Juliet Gardiner’s terms (1988), history as an ongoing dialogue between the present and the past. Continue reading A Man without a Country: In Quest of a Homeland by Yousof Mamoor
As Angie Thomas asks, “What’s the point of having a voice if you’re gonna be silent in those moments you shouldn’t be?” Continue reading “Your voices matter, your dreams matter, your lives matter”: on BLM
As a war narrative enveloped in magic, love, and hope, The Baghdad Clock adds depth to the burgeoning genre of postcolonial Iraqi novels. Continue reading The Real and the Imaginary: The Baghdad Clock by Shahad Al Rawi
“Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing “we” can do—but who is that “we”?—and nothing “they” can do either—and who are “they”?—then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.” Continue reading Susan Sontag on Compassion
Without a doubt, 2020 has been a testing time for all of us across the globe. Fortunately for us book lovers, the new decade has been packed with compelling debuts and stunning new titles. From The Magical Language of Others: … Continue reading Most Anticipated Books of 2020 (May-September)
meditations on home, belonging & all things literary 
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