Malavika Praseed

[ad_1] As someone who normally reads standalone literary fiction, I sometimes find it challenging to approach genre fiction, namely because it’s hard to know exactly where to start. I’ve found myself picking up a fantasy novel at the library, reading a chapter or two in utter confusion, only to then realize I’m in book two … Read more

[ad_1] In 1966, Jean Rhys published Wide Sargasso Sea, a reimagining of Jane Eyre that delved into the past and present of Mr. Rochester’s first wife, Bertha Mason. Simply seen as the omnipresent ‘madwoman’ in Bronte’s novel, Rhys gave her a complex inner world and humanized her apparent madness. There have been numerous spiritual successors … Read more

[ad_1] Deciding what book to read next can be an arduous task. I’ve been known to comb through recommendations from friends, bestseller lists, and review publications like this one, sometimes for hours on end. But sometimes it’s simpler. Just an appealing cover and a catchy premise. “A bandit walks into a coffeehouse, and it all … Read more

[ad_1] At fourteen years old I was assigned Paolo Coelho’s landmark novel The Alchemist for summer reading. I threw it on my bed in disgust, barely able to finish the slim volume. To my literal mind it read like nothing more than vague, repetitive abstractions, amounting to almost nothing in the end. Today, over ten … Read more

[ad_1] It became clear to Jia Jia that Chen Hang must not have considered, not even for a moment, that such a place was improper for a death. These are the thoughts that surface for Jia Jia mere moments after she finds her husband dead in their bathtub. As Jia Jia awaits an ambulance, she … Read more

[ad_1] When I was a graduate student, I enrolled in a medical ethics course, and one of the first things we discussed was the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study. This was a twentieth-century effort to study the effects of syphilis in African-American men and resulted in hundreds of people not receiving adequate treatment simply to understand … Read more

[ad_1] Books, perhaps more so than other media, have the remarkable ability to stay timeless after generations on end. The author’s dilemma is finding balance between establishing setting through concrete detail without allowing the material to become dated. But what happens when the author throws this idea out the window? Jeet Thayil’s Low could only … Read more