Nalini Iyer
Salman Rushdie’s “Quichotte” takes the reader on a highly imaginative road trip across...
Salman Rushdie is perhaps the best known contemporary South Asian writer. With 13 novels, four non-fiction works, a short story collection, the Booker and the Best of Booker, a notorious fatwa from the late...
Children’s picture books by South Asian writers that focus on contemporary South Asian and...
Children’s picture books by South Asian writers and publishers focused on contemporary South Asian and diasporic culture are increasing in number. Their audiences are both cosmopolitan anglophone children growing up in South Asia’s metropolises...
“There’s Something About Sweetie” has a commendable body positivity message, but falters by romanticizing...
Sandhya Menon’s debut novel When Dimple Met Rishi (2017) hit the New York Times Best seller list and got a lot of rave reviews for its charming narrative about two Indo-American teenagers who are...
Novel “Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss” examines the existential challenges of a highly successful...
A quirky novel, Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss takes the reader into the life of a highly successful Indian born emeritus professor of Economics at Cambridge. Chandra, as he is known, is a contender for...
“New Kings of the World” examines the influence of Bollywood, Turkish Dizi and K-Pop...
A few years ago, I took a taxi home from SeaTac airport, and my cab driver was a Somali man who had grown up in Kenya before moving to the United States. We got...
“Gun Island” explores climate change, migration and a world hurtling toward a climate apocalypse
In his The Great Derangement (2016), Amitav Ghosh critiqued realist fiction for not grappling with climate change, and his new novel, Gun Island, pushes the limits of realist fiction to examine the disparate and...
In “Kansastan”, Old Testament and Islamic folklore references shape this dystopian civil...
A quirky, dark and dystopic novel, Kansastan evokes the American civil war but also could be read as an allegory for our times. In this novel, Kansas and Missouri are in the midst of...
Mohammed Hanif’s novel Red Bird satirizes Western wars waged on the Muslim world
Author of two prior novels, A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008) and Our Lady of Alice Bhatti (2011), Mohammed Hanif is known for his dark, absurdist humor and satirical political novels about Pakistan. Red...
Three current young adult novels that take on Islamaphobia, homophobia and racism
The young teens who are and will be the audience of these books were all born after 9/11 and after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a time when Muslims are characterized as the enemy...
Siddarth Dube: Growing up gay in the 80s in India, becoming a human rights...
In An Indefinite Sentence: A Personal History of Outlawed Love and Sex, Siddharth Dube writes a compelling memoir of being a cosmopolitan gay Indian man in a nation that criminalized homosexuality and of coming...
