A Dictator Calls (2023) by Ismail Kadare: Milan Kundera wrote in his seminal work ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’ that ‘the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’. Treading on this dangerous lane, Ismail Kadare, the leading novelist of Albania, draws a fine line between the treacherous historical truth…
Jeremy Nobel’s latest work, published by Penguin Publishing Group, takes on a dynamic look at loneliness and the growing issue of chronic illnesses associated with it. Recently, WHO declared loneliness as a ‘pressing global threat’, so much so that the average mortality quotient is equivalent to the effect of smoking 15 cigarettes every day. Project…
As we remember the assassination of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, Paul Auster’s Bloodbath Nation (2023) navigates through the horrifying history of gun violence in America and what initiated the statelessness of political conditions in the purview of obstructive legislative or executive forces. It is a blind eye that we turn to the eight…
Dive into the poems for Mary Oliver’s A Thousand Mornings imbibed with the solace of her observations in Nature. In an interview with Krista Tippett in 2015, Mary Oliver profoundly proclaimed – ‘I did find the entire world, in looking for something. But I got saved by poetry, and I got saved by the beauty…
Celebrations of the Turkey Holiday, or what we call Thanksgiving, spread across the globe on 23rd November this year. It is not a surprise that it is celebrated across the planet at various intercontinental zones. Be it the United States, Grenada, Liberia or Norfolk Island in the Australian Territory, Thanksgiving marks a significant end to…
Come and travel with the author as we explore the simple philosophies of living the hilly-billy silly mountain life that Ruskin Bond professed in his A Book of Simple Living (2015) If a man can be known by the ‘nature’ of his work, literally or more so, a child in us reminisces about Bond. This…