My review of John Updike’s ‘Terrorist: A Novel’
ChrestomatherJohn Updike: Terrorist: A Novel Alfred A. Knopf, June 2006, 310 pp., $25.00. John Updike’s new novel is set in a New Jersey mill town that has…
A Reader’s Circle in Venice
I first visited Venice in the summer of 1981 (when I should have been working on my thesis). One day I got…
Thanks to everyone who signed Igiaba Scego’s petition!
In my post of April 15 I wrote about the Italian-Somali writer Igiaba Scego: 'Like many in Italy Igiaba is deeply concerned about recent attempts to…
Evocations of connected histories – Kerala, Venice & Guangdong
Sometimes we stumble upon objects and practices that are separated by immense distances and yet seem to bear a resemblance to each other. For example, in August 2001,…
A Hazara Writer from Mazar-e-Sharif
A little more than a year ago I was writing blog posts from Kabul. One of…
A Somali-Italian Writer’s Campaign Against a Fascist Monument
Igiaba Scego's story Salsiccia ('Sausage') won Italy's Eks&Tra prize in 2003 and her novel La mia casa è dove sono ('My home is where I am') won the prestigious…
Venice – Crossroad of Books & Words
This month I am participating in an event called Incroci di Civiltà in Venice, along with many other writers including Adonis, Bi Feiyu, Stephen Greenblatt, Gabriella Kuruvilla, Edmund de…
In Memory of Ayaz Quadir
In 2008, while traveling in Bangladesh, I was invited to go on a boat-trip in the Sundarbans. Amongst the group on the boat was a boy by the name…