Still. Something is missing. Something is off. So, how fucking spoiled am I, then? How fucking broken? What is wrong with me that I can have everything I could ever want and have ever asked for and still wake up in the morning feeling like every day is a slog? In Becky Chambers's first solarpunk, … Continue reading On Finding The Strength To Do Both
Early evening: the sky is unsually free of clouds. There is an impressive array of fixed and shooting stars. The sight brings tears to my eyes. My thoughts dwell on the latitude and the positioning of the firmament. I am so far from home that the constellations have come unhinged from their usual positions and … Continue reading Book Review: Cold Skin By Albert Sánchez Piñol, Translated By Cheryl Leah Morgan
Because survival is insufficient. It is not easy to say that. I don't know the context in which the line appeared in Star Trek: Voyager, episode 122, twenty-three years ago, but we can't use that expression now without sounding borderline insensitive, as the COVID-19 pandemic goes on, controlling the planet, coercing us to be grateful … Continue reading Book Review: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
We are vessels of desire. We are conditioned to believe that who we are, the vessel that we are, is enough to hold all the desire that bubbles inside us, that we can live out this cosmic blink of a life by bottling it all up, by even refusing to acknowledge the existence of desire, … Continue reading Book Review: The Earthspinner by Anuradha Roy
The cover and the endpapers of Krupa Ge's What We Know About Her feature an illustration that reminds me of Ranganathan Theru, a popular commercial street in Chennai, or rather Madras, as the narrator Yamuna continues to lovingly call this city in 2019, even after it was officially renamed in 1996. In the art that … Continue reading Book Review: What We Know About Her by Krupa Ge
In my last post -- a review of Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous -- I wrote, "If the fences are eventually lifted, where will we go from there?" Strangely, Leesa Gazi's Hellfire, translated from the Bengali by Shabnam Nadiya, starts from there. Lovely gets out of the house for the first time all … Continue reading Book Review: Hellfire by Leesa Gazi
I am always looking for something sweet, something ugly, something that talks about what it means to be human, something that can tell me that there is meaning and that this life is not absurd, and something that can hold space for me to salvage myself. Even when I read a pop-science book on how … Continue reading Book Review: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous By Ocean Vuong
Trigger Warning: This blog contains mentions of suicide and depression. There was a lid over the world. As in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, I thought. I wondered if I should read it again, but surely it would only intensify my sense of isolation, I punch my fists into the air as if to smash … Continue reading Book Review: Long Live The Post Horn by Vigdis Hjorth
My mother's garden received an unusual visitor. A snail. When I had posted a picture of the snail on Twitter, my friend Caroline recommended Elisabeth Tova Bailey's The Sound of A Wild Snail Eating. I was in between quite a few books when the recommendation came my way, but it became an antidote to my … Continue reading Book Review: The Sound of A Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey
Trigger Warning: Mentions of sexual violence and genocide In Purananuru, an anthology of four hundred Tamil poems written by more than 152 poets between the first and third centuries C.E., emperors were exalted. Their wisdom, and their valour in war were celebrated. But women were assigned certain roles. They were the martyrs’ mothers, widows, and … Continue reading Book Review: The Orders Were To Rape You
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