Published by Motifs / Le Serpent à Plumes, 1994, 177 pages. Published in English as The Land without Shadows, University of Virginia Press, 2005. Translated from French by Jeanne Garane. A man forgets his own language and finds himself speaking Creole; a young woman runs away from her village to escape an arranged marriage to …
Author: suroor alikhan
I have always been an avid reader. I read across genres and try and find books by writers from countries around the world. One of the things I love is talking to fellow readers about books!
Ladies’ Tailor: Priya Hajela
Published by Harper Collins, 2022, 295 pages. “The people, the smells, the voices, the yearning, the hands clutching bellies—for that’s where their few precious belongings were—the odour of fear, the taste of dislocation, the sounds of desperation: that is what Gurdev sensed all around him when they reached Lahore station.” In 1947, when India was …
Combining Languages and Images: An Interview with Slavko Milekić
Self portrait by Slavko Milekić Slavko Milekić is a Serbian author, artist, translator and neuropsychologist, who now lives in Mexico. His books include Word Beads (2019), a collection of short stories, which he also illustrated; and The Theory of Language (1999), which he cowrote with Steven Weisler. Slavko teaches Cognitive Science and Digital Design at …
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A Little Luck: Claudia Piñeiro
Translated from Spanish by Frances RiddlePublished by Charco Press, 2023, 210 pages. Original version published in 2015. “It takes so many words to recount events that occur in a matter of minutes, seconds, fractions of time that are barely perceptible. Things happen so quickly that the words needed to describe them are never able to …
Three Apples Fell from the Sky: Narine Abgaryan
Translated from Russian by Lisa C. HaydenPublished by Oneworld Publications, 2020, 255 pages. Original version published in 2014. One Friday, Anatolia Sevoyants put her affairs in order and lay down to breathe her last. She had been bleeding heavily for days, although her periods had stopped some years ago, and she was convinced she was …
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A Brief History of Seven Killings: Marlon James
Published by OneWorld, 2014, 688 pages. “If it no go so, it go near so.” “[E]ven though the Singer is the center of the story, it really isn’t his story. Like there’s a version of this story that’s not really about him, but about the people around him, the ones who come and go that …
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Looking back at a decade of Talking About Books
Photo: bee boys via Shutterstock A decade ago, the first post went up on Talking About Books, announcing its arrival. The first review followed soon after, exactly 10 years ago today.[1] This post is a way of taking stock of the journey and of thanking the people who have been part of it. When I …
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Amanat—Women’s Writing from Kazakhstan: Edited by Zaure Batayeva and Shelley Fairweather-Vega
Translated from Kazakh and Russian by Zaure Batayeva, Shelley Fairweather-Vega and Sam BreazealePublished by Gaudy Boy, 2022, 267 pages. This collection of women’s stories from Kazakhstan is the first of its kind. The Kazakh word “amanat” has many meanings, as the translators explain in their introduction. It is “a promise entwined with hope for the …
Murder in Old Bombay: Nev March
Published by Harper Collins / Minotaur Books, 2021, 383 pages. Bombay, 1892. Bacha and Pilloo, two young women, fall to their deaths from the city’s clocktower. The police conclude that it was suicide. Captain James Agnihotri of the British army is recovering in hospital in Bombay after a skirmish in Karachi with the Pathans, a …
Finding Other Ways of Seeing: An Interview with Jacob Ross
Jacob Ross is a Grenadian novelist, playwright, poet and journalist. He now lives in the UK, where he teaches creative writing. His books include Pynter Bender (2008), which, in 2009, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Regional Prize, the Society of Authors Best First Novel, and the Caribbean Review of Books "Book of the Year"; …
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Talking About Books 