19Jul/19
Close reading of Kwame Dawes’s ‘The Third Former’s Burden’ from Progeny of Air, by William Ghosh
A House for Mr Biswas has been canonized, as Harish Trivedi says, ‘as one of the greatest postcolonial novels in English’. […]
11Aug/17
Close reading of Diran Adebayo’s Some Kind of Black by Chelsea Haith
Close reading of Diran Adebayo’s Some Kind of Black Chelsea Haith The following extract is taken from pp. 86–88, Chapter 5, “Welcome to the Fold”, of Some Kind of Black (Little, Brown, 1996). NoRead More…
10Aug/17
Motherhood and Mother Tongue in Sarah Howe’s ‘Crossing from Guangdong’ by Lorraine Lau
For Sarah Howe, the English-speaking daughter of an orphaned Chinese mother, the themes of motherhood and mother tongue are inextricably linked.
09Aug/17
‘Labour and Literary Form in Harare North’ by Josh Jewell
In literary studies, we tend to think of cultural forms (poems/plays/novels) as imaginatively conjured containers for a particular writer’s plot and characters…
08Aug/17
‘The Presence of the Ghazal in The Meanest Flower (2007)’ by Holly Fathi
Reviewers often position Mimi Khalvati as a ‘Persian poet’ due to her inclusion of Persian imagery, form, and the occasional line of Farsi in her poetry.
08Aug/17
Close reading of Diana Evans’s 26a by Tessa Roynon
‘My first book is about the loss of a twin, what happens beyond that loss’, says Diana Evans in a 2018 BBC radio interview.
07Aug/17
Close reading of Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil by C. S. Bhagya
The heart of Nadeem Aslam’s third novel, The Wasted Vigil (2008), echoes John Berger’s often quoted claim (excerpted from his Booker-winning novel G.): ‘Never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one’.
06Aug/17
Close reading of Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist by Khadeeja Khalid
Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist follows the experiences of the chameleon-like protagonist, Pran Nath…
06Aug/17
Close reading of V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas by William Ghosh
A House for Mr Biswas has been canonized, as Harish Trivedi says, ‘as one of the greatest postcolonial novels in English’. […]
05Aug/17
Close reading of Moniza Alvi’s ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’ by William Ghosh
Alvi’s poem, ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’ (‘a little night music’) shares its title with a Mozart serenade (No. 13 for Strings in G Major) and a Stephen Sondheim musical. But its direct point of reference is a 1943 painting, ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’, by the American surrealist Dorothea Tanning. […]