IF ever there were a time to not judge a book by its cover, it would be during the longlisting of novels for the Man...
Published 14 Dec, 2014 06:39am
HERMITS have their own world, their own sense of perception and expression, and, indeed, their own interpretation of...
Published 14 Dec, 2014 06:39am
The following excerpt is taken from the chapter, ‘Human and civil rights of marginalised sections’
Published 14 Dec, 2014 06:39am
AS the nature and goals of terrorism change, dialogue or negotiation with terror groups such as the self-styled...
Published 14 Dec, 2014 06:39am
THE Bāng-e Darā (Call of the Bell) of Iqbal has given us a simple, cute poem called ‘A Cow and a Goat,’ a poem...
Published 14 Dec, 2014 06:39am
THOUGH inequalities, across countries as well as within them, are large, on average people living today are much...
Published 07 Dec, 2014 07:09am
TWO women travel to the same point on earth from opposite directions and almost 30 years apart, their journeys, ...
Published 07 Dec, 2014 07:09am
WHILE a lot has been written about Amitabh Bachchan, there is a dearth of material on the man whose throne he...
Published 07 Dec, 2014 07:09am
RUMMAGING through books, old and new, arranged unsystematically in my bookshelf, I came across a thin volume titled...
Published 07 Dec, 2014 07:09am
Reviewed by Waqar Zaidi
Published 07 Dec, 2014 07:09am
WHEN he was translating St-John Perse’s poem Anabase, T. S. Eliot wrote to the French poet to say that he...
Published 07 Dec, 2014 07:09am
Reviewed by Sameen Amer
Updated 04 Jul, 2015 08:47pm
MYANMAR has been in and out of the news since 1962 when its army dismissed the civilian government. Among the ...
Published 01 Dec, 2014 03:54pm
DISTINGUISHED critic Dr Anwar Ahmad has come out with a novel idea. He says that “we stand in need of some common...
Published 01 Dec, 2014 03:54pm
THE success of Bina Shah’s previous novels has depended largely on their fast-paced, high-stakes plots, ...
Published 01 Dec, 2014 03:54pm
ON the morning of Oct 13, 1970 the body of the former CSP officer and famous poet, Syed Mustafa Zaidi, was found at...
Published 01 Dec, 2014 03:54pm
RAISE your hand if you were once obsessed with nursery rhymes. Jack Spratt who ate no fat, the poor helpless three...
Published 23 Nov, 2014 07:44am
AS Hanif Kureishi wrote in a recent article for The Guardian, today’s immigrant is facing the ultimate ...
Published 23 Nov, 2014 07:44am
DAVID Nicholls’ Us did not make the cut for The Man Booker Prize 2014 shortlist and it is true that it was berated...
Published 23 Nov, 2014 07:44am
SINCE 1947, Pakistan has passed through an unending sequence of critical junctures. Reeling from crisis to crisis,...
Published 23 Nov, 2014 07:44am
Oh Lord, let this two-toned rose find place in the corner of the turban of acceptanceAnd let thanks be due from me ...
Published 23 Nov, 2014 07:44am
ECONOMIC Impact of HIV/AIDS on Households by Savio P. Falleiro provides comprehensive research on how individuals ...
Published 23 Nov, 2014 07:44am
REGRETTABLY, as with Hasan Manzar, but perhaps to a greater degree, the conspicuous absence of Ikramullah from...
Published 16 Nov, 2014 06:20am
EVERY time Mushtaq Ahmad Yusufi, the wordsmith par excellence, penned a book, he came, he saw and he conquered. This...
Published 16 Nov, 2014 06:20am
PARVEEN Shakir was born on a rainy day in November 1952, in Karachi. By the age of 25, she had made her mark as a...
Published 16 Nov, 2014 06:20am
ERUDITE political journalist, B.Z. Khasru, focuses his attention in The Bangladesh Military Coup and the CIA Link on...
Published 16 Nov, 2014 06:20am
The following excerpt is taken from the chapter, 'Accumulation, Estrangement, and Displacement'
Published 16 Nov, 2014 06:20am
SRINAGAR, Kashmir, in the early 1990s. A young man paints dozens of delicate naqashi papier-mache pencil boxes that...
Published 16 Nov, 2014 06:20am
“Characters are my primary objects of love.” — Mirza Waheed
Published 16 Nov, 2014 06:20am
Reviewed by Kabir Altaf
Published 09 Nov, 2014 07:16am
Reviewed by Raza Naeem
Published 09 Nov, 2014 07:16am
TO contemporary readers who are unfamiliar or out of touch with the obscurer lamentations of England’s...
Published 09 Nov, 2014 07:16am
MEDIA Safety in Pakistan: A Study of Threats to Journalists in Pakistan, published by the Pakistan Institute for...
Published 09 Nov, 2014 07:16am
TO those fortunate enough to have known him, Akhtar bin Shahid Jafri, or simply A.B.S., was a towering personality....
Published 09 Nov, 2014 07:16am
OXFORD University Press in Karachi is bringing out selections from Urdu poets keeping in view the common readers of...
Published 09 Nov, 2014 07:16am
ITALIAN academicians and practitioners have been involved in conservation and restoration measures across Pakistan...
Published 02 Nov, 2014 06:27am
Every day the world is beloved by me, the seagull eager / for its perch. I woke up this morning to a darkened room,...
Published 02 Nov, 2014 06:27am
IN SEPTEMBER, INTIZAR HUSAIN WAS MADE AN OFFICER OF THE ORDER OF ARTS AND LETTERS OF THE FRENCH ACADEMY, IN...
Published 02 Nov, 2014 06:27am
Asif Farrukhi’s comments on Intizar Husain’s work on the occasion
Published 02 Nov, 2014 06:27am
HONESTLY, I don’t even know where to begin with The Blazing World. Longlisted for the 2014 Man Booker prize, Siri...
Published 02 Nov, 2014 06:27am
RABA’I Al-Madhoun was born in Al-Majdal, Ashkalan (now Ashkelon), Palestine, in 1945. Along with his parents, he...
Published 02 Nov, 2014 06:27am
THE poetic form of the marsiya has come to be associated, in Urdu, exclusively with the tragedy of Karbala. We can...
Published 02 Nov, 2014 06:27am
THE 7th Urdu Conference started with a big bang. At the opening ceremony, there were people all over the place. Even...
Published 27 Oct, 2014 02:19pm
KEEPING Urdu alive in an age promoting a homogeneous — and, indeed, humongous — culture is quite a challenge. If...
Published 27 Oct, 2014 02:19pm
SESSIONS in memoriam are generally meant to relive the lives of people who were able to give some meaning to the...
Published 27 Oct, 2014 02:19pm
WHILE participating in the Urdu Conference held in Karachi, I tried my best to attend all the sessions but the...
Published 27 Oct, 2014 02:19pm
Reviewed by Mohammed Qasim Mehdi
Published 27 Oct, 2014 02:19pm
"Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall’s fiction"
Published 27 Oct, 2014 02:19pm
WINNER of the Man Booker Prize this year, The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan is an unflinching...
Published 27 Oct, 2014 02:19pm
THERE is always a latent touch of Mantoesque idiom that runs underneath almost everything that Mustansar Hussain...
Published 27 Oct, 2014 02:19pm
Festival, named after writer Khushwant Singh, held at the almost unspoilt and picturesque hill station, Kasauli.
Updated 26 Oct, 2014 04:33pm
Nida Kirmani’s sociological study, Questioning the Muslim Woman: Identity and Insecurity in an Urban Indian...
Published 20 Oct, 2014 02:34pm
IN a discussion about the literary imagination, Italo Calvino reflects upon the nature of archetypal images and ...
Published 20 Oct, 2014 02:34pm
MODERN childhood, as we know it, is less than a century old. Children have gone from contributors to the family...
Published 20 Oct, 2014 02:34pm
CONDENSING all known global history in a single book is an ambitious as well as a monumental task. British historian...
Published 20 Oct, 2014 02:34pm
A famous actor has a sudden heart attack while playing King Lear on stage in Toronto one night. An eight-year-old...
Published 20 Oct, 2014 02:34pm
TO say that the appeal of Ghalib is timeless is to say the obvious. Indeed it is a ranked understatement. Ghalib’s...
Published 20 Oct, 2014 02:34pm
“I have seen from very close quarters a number of well-known personalities and have learnt much from non-entities...
Published 20 Oct, 2014 02:34pm
HARUKI Murakami is not only the greatest contemporary Japanese novelist but a global literary phenomenon. Loved by...
Published 12 Oct, 2014 07:37am
WHILE browsing the haphazardly arranged titles at a book stall, one in particular captured my attention — Sacred...
Published 12 Oct, 2014 07:37am
Reviewed by Aneeqa Mazhar Wattoo
Published 12 Oct, 2014 07:37am
NOON Meem Rashid is a difficult poet to understand. To begin with, his language is at once too rich and too...
Published 12 Oct, 2014 07:37am
WHILE reading ‘Kawwa Bhonkta Kiyon Hai,’ in Mumtaz Hussain’s Lafzon Main Tasweerain, and before reaching the...
Published 12 Oct, 2014 07:37am
MOVE over, Elizabeth Bennet, you finally have a contender. When Lizzy won our hearts with her good-natured...
Published 12 Oct, 2014 07:37am
A THEME now dominating new works on Islam is a forceful denunciation of its perceived takeover by the conservative...
Published 09 Oct, 2014 03:27pm
MAULANA Ghulam Rasool Mehr’s biography of Ghalib was first published under the title Ghalib in 1936. It was...
Published 09 Oct, 2014 03:27pm
IN Urdu Ki Nasri Dastanain, a detailed description of prose fiction in the classical period, Gyan Chand Jain...
Published 09 Oct, 2014 03:27pm
Reviewed by Chishty Mujahid
Published 09 Oct, 2014 03:27pm
IN 1918, some 50 years after Ghalib’s death, a manuscript was discovered in the Hamidiyya Library in the princely...
Published 09 Oct, 2014 03:27pm
ONE is tempted to begin the review of Raza Mir’s The Taste of Words: An Introduction to Urdu Poetry by quoting...
Published 09 Oct, 2014 03:27pm
KITAB Balasubramanyam is more concerned about his cyber-life than his real one. He starts and ends each day by...
Published 09 Oct, 2014 03:27pm
Reviewed by Asma Mundrawala
Published 29 Sep, 2014 04:42pm
IN the autumn of 1992, while conducting field research in Egypt, I attended a talk at the American University in...
Published 29 Sep, 2014 04:42pm
BACK in the day, I wrote a piece in Dawn op-ed on feminism, saying something like feminism needed to be more...
Published 29 Sep, 2014 04:42pm
CANCER is still a dreaded word, a disease most of us fear and one which many among our friends and acquaintances ...
Published 29 Sep, 2014 04:42pm
THERE are two reasons why I didn’t set fire to my copy of Orfeo, Richard Powers’ latest book, which had been...
Published 29 Sep, 2014 04:42pm
QALAM Say Awaz Tak is a highly readable treasure-trove of the history of Urdu broadcasting and various literary...
Published 29 Sep, 2014 04:42pm
Forster writes his renowned reflection on racial tensions and philosophical questions at the time of the British Raj.
Updated 21 Sep, 2014 08:51am
By my lights, dim though they may be, the story had neither smut nor objectionable political content nor sex.
Updated 21 Sep, 2014 08:13am
Rowling takes her cues from traditional mystery fiction to come up with a curious second installment in crime series.
Updated 04 Jul, 2015 08:41pm
WHEN we last met Butterfly in Moni Mohsin’s Tender Hooks, her main preoccupation with life was finding a girl for...
Published 21 Sep, 2014 06:38am
AT the start of The Bone Clocks, Holly Sykes seems to be an ordinary enough teenager: living with her parents in...
Published 21 Sep, 2014 06:38am
THE editor of the Alhamra Literary Review, Shahid Ali Khan, has placed in the September issue an article which he ...
Published 21 Sep, 2014 06:38am
THIS morning, when my mobile phone kept flashing and pinging, I found that I was being sent updates from one of ...
Published 15 Sep, 2014 01:58pm
Reviewed by Aneeqa Mazhar Wattoo
Published 15 Sep, 2014 01:58pm
A STARTLING name introduces the first collection of poems from the pen of a mature poet making his debut without any...
Published 15 Sep, 2014 01:58pm
MUSHTAQ Ahmed Yousufi’s outstanding book Aab-e-Gum is now also available in English translation. Translated by...
Published 15 Sep, 2014 01:58pm
IT has been almost 13 years since the first missiles landed on Afghanistan as a vengeful US sought to wreak terrible...
Published 15 Sep, 2014 01:58pm
SENIOR University of Michigan academician, Juan Cole, appears to have a twofold agenda in writing this book. On the...
Published 07 Sep, 2014 06:21am
“I have always been fascinated by languages. Perhaps I inherited my love for them from my parents. In order to...
Published 07 Sep, 2014 06:21am
JOHANNES Gutenburg’s letterpress printing machine in Germany in 1450 may not be an appropriate parallel to the...
Published 07 Sep, 2014 06:21am
ERIC Kennedy, who grew up in a small Massachusetts town not far from Hyannis Port, is not really Eric Kennedy;...
Published 07 Sep, 2014 06:21am
UNTIL the divide-and-rule policy was enforced by the colonial power after the mid-19th century, Hindus and Muslims...
Published 07 Sep, 2014 06:21am
RETIRED Colonel Masud Akhtar Shaikh is chiefly known to us as a translator of Turkish literature into English, Urdu...
Published 07 Sep, 2014 06:21am
Reviewed by Kabir Altaf
Published 31 Aug, 2014 06:23am
AFTER reading Jessie Burton’s The Miniaturist for 13 hours without break I can safely say that this debut is a...
Published 31 Aug, 2014 06:23am
FOR well over a decade now, the death of the print industry, whether journalism or book publishing, has been...
Published 31 Aug, 2014 06:23am
THE title Murree During the Raj: A British Town in the Hills may deceive you. It may give the impression that the...
Published 31 Aug, 2014 06:23am
THE grand old man belonging to the South Indian literary world has passed away. This should be taken as sad news in...
Published 31 Aug, 2014 06:23am
