A book provides valuable historic background to the development of Beijing-Islamabad ties but its amassing of ‘facts’ about the...
Published 14 Apr, 2024 07:46am
An autobiography of well-known Pakistani social activist Ansar Burney can serve to inspirea new generation of Pakistanis
Published 14 Apr, 2024 07:42am
A recent book goes behind the scenes to explain the strange case of a Soviet spy’s arrest in the US and trial in 1957, and his...
Published 14 Apr, 2024 07:35am
“Truth is, without an unconditional acknowledgement of the poetic virtues of Akhtar Shirani, an honest history of Urdu literature
Published 14 Apr, 2024 07:29am
An anthology of selected submissions from the first five years of the Zeenat Haroon Rashid Writing Prize for Women indicates that
Published 07 Apr, 2024 08:27am
A collection of interconnected stories transports one to a fictional place in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa that bears witness to a changing
Published 07 Apr, 2024 08:22am
The autobiography of a pioneering female hospital administrator is an inspirational tale that can help break gender stereotypes
Published 07 Apr, 2024 07:55am
The British actor, director, playwright and critic Harley Granville-Barker (1877-1946) writes in one of his famous prefaces to...
Published 07 Apr, 2024 07:50am
Architect Mukhar Husain’s autobiography is more than just a recounting of his personal journey. It is the story of a whole...
Published 31 Mar, 2024 09:22am
A collection of Urdu short stories lifts the curtain and reveals for us the lives of ordinary people in India, especially its...
Published 31 Mar, 2024 09:08am
A Pakistani diplomat and China expert analyses China’s journey from poverty to prosperity
Published 31 Mar, 2024 09:00am
On a recent visit to Iran, I was shocked at how little I could understand of spoken Persian. I could read and...
Published 31 Mar, 2024 08:52am
Established with a vision to celebrate and empower female voices in literature, The Zeenat Haroon Rashid Writing...
Published 31 Mar, 2024 08:02am
Ahmed Saeed’s posthumously published two volumes build on the classical works on Lahore to write a richly painted cultural...
Published 24 Mar, 2024 08:32am
A monograph from an academic hopes to have Pakistan rethink the very ethos of its economy and politics but, while well-intentioned
Published 24 Mar, 2024 08:18am
Muhammad Ali Siddiqi delves into more of his Evergreens from his reading shelf in a seventh installment
Published 24 Mar, 2024 08:13am
In my previous column, I had mentioned that the dozen or so Urdu poets we remember today as the masters of the language, through
Updated 24 Mar, 2024 09:42am
Despite numerous shortcomings in terms of language, a meticulously researched book paints a comprehensive picture of the violence
Published 17 Mar, 2024 08:25am
A reprint of journalist Ibrahim Jalees’ Urdu travelogue from a trip to China in 1951 offers a fascinating look into Chinese vision
Published 17 Mar, 2024 08:20am
Full House star John Stamos’s memoir candidly lays bare the ups and downs of his career and his life
Published 17 Mar, 2024 08:03am
In early 2007 in London, there was a sombre evening when Prof Amin Mughal and I met, a few months after my father’s passing in...
Published 17 Mar, 2024 07:56am
“I’m puzzled. You have Khadija and not Hajira,” Qurratulain Hyder — who mentored my progress in reading...
Published 10 Mar, 2024 07:25am
A collection of offbeat Urdu essays on ordinary and not-so-ordinary travel destinations transforms into poetic reflections
Published 10 Mar, 2024 07:25am
Peerzada Salman’s latest collection of poems are often about love and its emotional tribulations and range in tone from dark
Published 10 Mar, 2024 07:25am
An abridged English translation of eight volumes on the history of the Baloch and their land provides exhaustive information
Published 10 Mar, 2024 07:25am
A comparable development story of Pakistan, India and Bangladesh and sectoral data and analysis can be very useful for those who
Published 03 Mar, 2024 08:45am
Pulitzer Prize-winning Hisham Matar’s latest offering is more than just a novel — it is a fine blend of historical fiction,
Published 03 Mar, 2024 08:43am
Urdu poetess Ada Jafarey’s son posthumously translates his mother’s autobiography into English along with some of her work
Published 03 Mar, 2024 08:42am
This year marks the 100th anniversary of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India. When he published the novel in 1924, ...
Published 03 Mar, 2024 08:42am
Dr Selma Dabbagh is a British-Palestinian writer, an articulate voice on cataloguing the Palestinian experience...
Published 25 Feb, 2024 09:45am
The 15th Karachi Literature Festival encouraged many thought-provoking sessions on myriad subjects but was often overshadowed by
Published 25 Feb, 2024 09:36am
A new book presents a serious critical study of Mustansar Hussain Tarar’s novels
Published 25 Feb, 2024 09:32am
Since October 2023, the Israeli bombing in Gaza continues unabated. At the time of writing this piece, the official death toll of
Published 25 Feb, 2024 08:24am
The posthumous publication of a book by a well-respected financial journalist takes stock of Pakistan’s energy politics...
Published 18 Feb, 2024 08:50am
An English translation of an autobiographical French novel by a Chilean immigrant to Canada grapples with coming of age in exile
Published 18 Feb, 2024 08:44am
Josh Maleehabadi’s last poetic collection has been published 41 years after the poet’s death and contains verses not part of Josh
Published 18 Feb, 2024 08:38am
When I began translating Urdu dastaan classics in the late 1990s, I learned very soon that popular dictionaries like Firoz-ul
Published 18 Feb, 2024 08:32am
A pioneering pollster and political scientist offers a compelling read, compiling insights gained from Pakistan’s 11 elections so
Published 11 Feb, 2024 09:39am
An Urdu version of Omar Shahid Hamid’s first novel The Prisoner is a model exhibit of how a good translation can delight on its...
Published 11 Feb, 2024 09:31am
Excavating archival documents and maps, a recent book offers a wealth of source material on Afghanistan’s fraught relationship...
Published 11 Feb, 2024 09:26am
It is often forgotten that, in a social setting, we generally live under the tall shadows of constructed realities. But to say...
Published 11 Feb, 2024 09:22am
Pervez Hoodbhoy’s recent book on the birth of the idea of Pakistan and its shape-shifting over time, is a clinical academic...
Published 04 Feb, 2024 09:38am
An absorbing new Pakistani novel spans timelines from 1964 to 2019 and follows the lives of four friends, painting remarkably...
Updated 04 Feb, 2024 06:38pm
A recent book analyses how a changing socio-spatial landscape is affecting the nature of political relations in Punjab
Published 04 Feb, 2024 09:22am
Muhammad Ziauddin was an exceptionally fine man, a courageous journalist and a watchful editor. We had known each other for many
Published 04 Feb, 2024 09:18am
A re-release of the English translation of a 1974 Palestinian novel is a stark reminder of the brutality of the Israeli occupation
Published 28 Jan, 2024 09:35am
A forensic search and rescue expert takes readers through his day-to-day work experiences and his life
Published 28 Jan, 2024 09:28am
A recent book by a Pakistani author delves into China’s culture and history to try and explain its economic model, along with the
Published 28 Jan, 2024 09:22am
This past year I designed an undergraduate course that I called ‘The Poetry of Love’. One of the challenges of the course was how
Published 28 Jan, 2024 09:15am
A well-argued new book casts an expansive look at the history of technological development and argues that whether technology ends
Published 21 Jan, 2024 09:51am
A long-lost Urdu novel about the Lahore of the 1950s by one of Pakistan’s top filmmakers has been rediscovered and republished
Published 21 Jan, 2024 09:38am
A relatively slim volume belies the enormous value it contains in terms of documentation about the musical heritage of Pakistan...
Published 21 Jan, 2024 09:32am
It is difficult to reckon the breadth of scholarship once commonplace in the knowledge centres of pre-colonial India.
Published 21 Jan, 2024 09:21am
A book makes a formidable effort to collect information and trace sources on the history of the Hindu Sahi dynasty that ruled a...
Published 14 Jan, 2024 09:04am
A new book gathers in one place important and interesting information on Karachi’s first planned neighbourhoods — Nazimabad...
Published 14 Jan, 2024 08:59am
A coming-of-age memoir about religious intolerance, discrimination and violence in India echoes patterns of persecution in...
Published 14 Jan, 2024 08:50am
The bard famously wrote: “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet/ Are of imagination all compact/ One sees more devils than
Published 14 Jan, 2024 08:25am
I am homesick, I wrote to a friend in Kashmir who hasn’t left his native town in about a year, and is now ...
Published 07 Jan, 2024 07:14am
An Urdu translation of an English novel about a tempestuous love affair between Shams Tabraiz and Rumi’s adopted daughter
Published 07 Jan, 2024 07:14am
The pop singer’s memoir is a moving story of survival, fame, love, loss and hope and yet seems to gloss over some important
Published 07 Jan, 2024 07:14am
A stimulating book takes on the fallacies and flawed philosophies propounded by Pakistan’s elite in order to retain power over
Published 07 Jan, 2024 07:14am
An anthology of academic essays seeks to shift the focus away from the history of an imagined and unitary Pakistan, to the diverse
Published 31 Dec, 2023 08:47am
A collection of Urdu essays that combines satirical pieces with personality sketches and travelogues mostly misses the mark
Published 31 Dec, 2023 08:47am
Former British-Pakistani boxer Amir Khan’s autobiography reveals all about his career and the controversies that have dogged him
Published 31 Dec, 2023 08:47am
In a literary marketplace saturated with Eurocentric accounts of motherhood, Suma Din’s creative non-fiction work,...
Published 31 Dec, 2023 08:47am
A collection of writings by one of the foremost Marxist peasant activists shows how, for him, the struggle of Sindh’s rural
Updated 31 Dec, 2023 08:50am
A well-planned, well-executed and easy-to-read debut Urdu novel about ambition and redemption spans from Karachi to Conakry
Updated 31 Dec, 2023 08:49am
Salman Rashid’s latest book could well be used as a travel guidebook as well as an absorbing bedtime read
Updated 31 Dec, 2023 08:49am
Some of us in Pakistan continue to speak out against the erasure of memory project pursued by the powerful elites ...
Updated 31 Dec, 2023 08:48am
A former army officer’s autobiography provides eye-witness testimony to various historical events and is written
Published 17 Dec, 2023 07:57pm
A coffee-table tome full of exquisite photography educates about the richness of the history of Persia while also being a work
Published 17 Dec, 2023 07:57pm
In my last column, I had suggested that, as evidenced from the events in Palestine, a permanent shift is taking ...
Updated 18 Dec, 2023 10:47pm
At its heart, an anthology of creative writing from Pakistan is a compendium of the Pakistani experience, as expressed through
Published 17 Dec, 2023 07:57pm
We don’t have a decent edition of this glowing text — and this despite the fact that we have the observation of the famous
Updated 10 Dec, 2023 10:04pm
A translation into Urdu of a two-volume Pashto treatise about Bacha Khan’s Khudai Khidmatgar movement,
Published 10 Dec, 2023 08:13am
Farrukh Yar’s tribute to Shah Hussain is an impressive feat of in-depth knowledge, research and analysis about the evolution
Published 10 Dec, 2023 08:13am
Renowned Indian filmmaker Muzaffar Ali’s autobiography is a portrayal of a bygone world as well as a search for his authentic self
Published 10 Dec, 2023 08:13am
An in-depth study examines the relationship between China, Iran and Pakistan, the impact of whose cooperation goes beyond
Published 03 Dec, 2023 07:18am
Over the past many years in Lahore, be it at a book launch or any other political, social, cultural or literary...
Published 03 Dec, 2023 07:18am
An experimental and innovative debut Urdu novel from Osama Siddique delves into the political
Published 03 Dec, 2023 07:18am
The two-day 5th Adab Festival was another opportunity for those starved of intellectual discussions
Published 03 Dec, 2023 07:18am
A book born out of an intellectual debate about the history of Pakistan grapples with questions about the country’s genesis...
Published 26 Nov, 2023 09:17am
An English translation of a well-regarded Urdu novel manages to capture social and political dynamics in pre-Partition central
Published 26 Nov, 2023 09:08am
A book adds to the growing literature on the reasons for the failures of the US to implement its vision of Afghanistan
Published 26 Nov, 2023 08:38am
The great 19th century Urdu and Farsi poet Ghalib was a master in creating neologisms. He excelled in pushing language to its...
Published 26 Nov, 2023 08:26am
A compilation of selected articles by late columnist Irfan Husain from nearly three decades showcases his consistently honest...
Updated 19 Nov, 2023 07:19pm
A book of autobiographical episodes is a brisk and witty narrative about adventures of all types, that leaves the reader craving
Published 19 Nov, 2023 07:50am
An English translation of a collection of short stories by eminent critic M.H. Askari showcases human beings trying to make the
Updated 19 Nov, 2023 02:07pm
With Palestine, we are in a unique time in history. Savagery is the domain of power, and history is replete with examples of human
Published 19 Nov, 2023 07:37am
A scholarly book looks up close at the workings of the power sector in Pakistan and mounts a bold intellectual charge at the most
Published 12 Nov, 2023 07:27am
A second collection inspired by Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poetry uses the great Urdu poet’s poems as starting points for the English...
Published 12 Nov, 2023 07:22am
A book looks at the contributions of pre-Partition Punjab to Indian cinema
Published 12 Nov, 2023 07:18am
As autumn is edged away by winter in Islamabad, the 9th edition of the capital’s largest literary festival was organised by the...
Published 12 Nov, 2023 07:13am
Now in its fifth year, the Zeenat Haroon Rashid (ZHR) Writing Prize for Women 2023 has been awarded to writer Sana Mohsin for her
Published 12 Nov, 2023 07:11am
A collection of personal accounts of Sindhi Hindus, who had to uproot from their homeland after 1947 and replant themselves in...
Updated 05 Nov, 2023 09:32am
Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘lost’ near-autobiographical story of an enduring friendship that profoundly shaped her own perspectives on
Published 05 Nov, 2023 08:45am
A book by a journalist is a valuable resource for those seeking to understand the multifaceted nature of Islamist extremism in....
Published 05 Nov, 2023 08:32am
Sometimes the weight of the world’s problems forces you to seek the refuge of memory and fiction. And the uncertain weather,...
Published 05 Nov, 2023 08:23am
Karachi-born Farah Ali is the author of the short story collection People Want to Live (McSweeney’s, 2021). That book is being...
Published 29 Oct, 2023 07:03am
