Sad tiger by Neige Sinno is a memoir about abuse. The author recounts being sexually abused as a child by her stepfather. Years later, she fights back—taking him to court, standing trial, and ultimately seeing him sentenced to prison. But the book’s central question goes far beyond legal justice: did she truly survive the dark […]
I have been getting acquainted with the novels of the Canadian writer Andre Alexis over the past two months. His novel Pastoral is the first in a series titled Quincunx. One of the central characters is a priest who arrives in a remote village. As a young boy, he had heard a divine call—(he thought
“School of Night” is the newest (fourth) novel in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Morning Star series.A distinctive feature of this series is that all its books belong to the genre-fiction category. They are supernatural tales told through the perspectives of multiple characters. In The School of Night, for the first time in this series, Knausgaard presents
David Szalay’s Flesh is a novel that tells the life of a man who lived entirely by “going with the flow.” It’s a book I read simply because I had nothing else to read — and finished it in the same spirit. As a schoolboy, the protagonist has a relationship with an older woman —
In Fosse’s trilogy, how is what matters. The story does not exist merely to say where it is going. László, Bernard, Murnane — all of them are about how. Hunger is how, Stoner is how. In Dostoevsky and Leo (Tolstoy), how is primary. Their where is also magnificent — especially in works like Anna Karenina
When someone says “László,” the first thing that comes to my mind is Sátántangó — that six-and-a-half-hour-long film, one of Béla Tarr’s greatest works. It was when he came to borrow that movie that I first met Pradeep Bhasker, a great lover of books. At that time, I was in a reading slump — I
One Battle After Another is a grand-scale, darkly funny film that skewers American hypocrisy. It’s satire at its sharpest—mocking one of the world’s most powerful yet absurd countries and its chaotic political system. And yet, for all the detestation it attracts (these days even from Indian far-right voices), the U.S. has also nurtured some of
How Reading Mediocre books affects thinking and writing and in turn weakening a solid foundation Malayalam literature always had
Recently I finished reading Cixin Liu’s Death’s End. In the hardcore science fiction genre, it stands as a peak of human imagination (for imagination itself is intelligence). It’s also the conclusion of the series. The central plot is that an alien civilization tries to conquer Earth. Humanity spends centuries preparing a weapon to face them.
Adrian Tchaikovsky continues his prolific streak— it feels like every six months there’s something new from him. This time, it’s The Hungry Gods, set in yet another post-apocalyptic world filled with talking animals and birds. Was it as good as Shroud? For me, the answer is no. But with Tchaikovsky, there’s always something fresh to latch onto—some concept,
Today, I came across a ridiculous post by a so-called poet of Malayalam, offering his take on Cherukad—one of the finest memoirists in our language. This poet attempts to trivialize Cherukad’s legacy with a shallow and dismissive commentary—an effort as superficial as his own poetry. Sadly, this is the sort of noise that thrives in
2025, Week 31 Daytripper – Fábio Moon & Gabriel Bá Daytripper is a 10-part graphic novel series by Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá, later published as a single book. It follows Brás, a wannabe writer and the son of a renowned author. He writes obituaries for a local newspaper—work he finds dull but that turns