GIRAR, INTERLUDE: THE NEW YEAR, IN CHINESE DIASPORIC TERMS (Lisbon, Portugal)

[This is an excerpt from a work in progress. More details to be revealed shortly] The park around Alameda metro faced an old fountain the size of a building. It was gray, emblematic, and yet cobbling apart. While most tourists would have come to the park to observe it, or to go to the houses […]

BOOK REVIEW: Lord of the Senses, by Vikram Kolmannskog

  To be in between the lines, subtly, and yet markedly so, is a condition a lot of us is starting to identify as in the 21st century, but something still experienced by a minority, and of a particular sort. As an Indian-American queer, I identify as one of these in-betweeners. Having lived a life […]

Girar, Interlude: Times Square (New York, New York)

[This is an excerpt from a work in progress. More details to be revealed shortly]   They all shouted one, and a giant ball, morphing gold and silver, dropped from the very top of a pole on One Times Square down towards the earth, landing on the roof of the building itself. Confetti rained from […]

Book Review: I Am A Cat, by Natsume Soseki

I Am A Cat is an early 20th century novel written by Natsume Soseki, one of the greatest of the Japanese modernists. The novel is a set of three volumes originally composed in Japanese, told from the perspective of a household cat listening in on the people around him. I had originally started the novel […]

Book Review: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Bronte

From the beginning sentiments of the book, I could tell this was a novel for me. Almost all Indians are raised with the assumption that to carry on the traditions of the household are best, and that all individual pursuits need be suppressed. I thus immediately was able to realize that this was a novel […]

Book Review: The World Goes On, by László Krasznahorkai

From the first pages, it is easy to gleam that this was a book written for the traveler and a book written to be traversed. It is divided into two sections, he speaks and he narrates. The first part deals with the pontifications of someone who has seen the world, the next part travels across […]

Book Review: A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara

There has been an early 21st century tendency to return to the social sweep realist or naturalist novel of the 20th century, particularly in the United States, as if the clock need be rewinded, all the innovations of modernism and postmodernism be tossed out the window, and another path for aesthetic sublimity need be wandered […]

Book Review: The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World, by Margaret Cavendish

The sentences in Cavendish’s most important work of fiction, The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World, intertwine and tangle as if without breathe, run on as if they must perspire, and it was in these sentences, so delightfully exuberant, so unabashedly flamboyant, that I found that this was a book worth reading, […]

Book Review: Behind the Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo

When a writer – a he, or she, a Hindu, or a Catholic, a Turk, or a Slovak – fundamentally writes about an Other, we expect the writer to blunder more than to succeed. Perhaps there is something inevitable about the fact that we are born and raised in a certain skin, framed through the […]

Book Review: The Ice Palace, by Tarjei Vesaas

Very few novels that I have read master atmosphere the way Vesaas has. From the moment you begin the novel until the moment the novel has finished, you feel as if you yourself are living in a palace of ice, surrounded by blizzard, the nape of your fingers shivering, the skin of your cheeks set […]