Season Of The Rainbirds

Download or read book Season of the Rainbirds written by Nadeem Aslam and published by Random House India. This book was released on 2012-09-25 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set during a monsoon season in the 1980s in a small town in Pakistan, Season of the Rainbirds is centred on the mysterious reappearance of a sack of letters lost in a train crash nineteen years previously. Could the letters have any bearing on Judge Anwar’s murder? The letters and the judge’s death trigger a series of tragic events and as the murder investigation progresses, dark tales of passion and betrayal unfold and long-buried secrets come to light. The narrative segues between several characters—the judge’s family, a cleric troubled by local inhabitants’ lapses, a Muslim deputy commissioner defiantly involved with a Christian woman, a feudal landlord and a crusading journalist reporting on the delivery of the mail packet—and comes to a head when the journalist disappears and the country lurches between fear and uncertainty following an assassination attempt on the president. One of the most exquisite fictional debuts, Season of the Rainbirds is a compelling portrayal of a society in strife, of a timeless world where daily rituals are played out against an ominous landscape of oppression, decadence, bigotry and power.

Download or read book British Muslim Fictions written by C. Chambers and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-03-09 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through interviews with leading writers (including Ahdaf Soueif and Hanif Kureishi), this book analyzes the writing and opinions of novelists of Muslim heritage based in the UK. Discussion centres on writers' work, literary techniques, and influences, and on their views of such issues as the hijab, the war on terror and the Rushdie Affair.

Download or read book The Big Bookshelf written by Sunil Sethi and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2011-01-27 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Famous writers are often reticent about how and why they write, how their ideas and themes develop or how their characters and plots emerge. They can be equally reserved about their personal histories. But in the hands of seasoned journalist and skilful interviewer Sunil Sethi, presenter of Just Books, NDTV’s long-running weekend literary show, they open up in unexpected and fascinating ways. In this selection of thirty of his best interviews from Just Books, they speak freely and frankly about their craft, their life stories and the nature of their creative impulse. Featured here are literary giants, including Nobel laureates and Booker Prize winners; internationally acclaimed historians, biographers and philosophers; authors of best-selling thrillers, novels and travel books; and brilliant young trendsetters. Their conversations with Sethi are, in turn, reflective and incisive, witty and poignant, but always candid and intimate, as they provide rare insights into their inner lives and engagement with the world they inhabit. Each voice in this diverse collection is original, distinctive and revealing, as they cover the wide terrain of life and literature. A veritable feast for all book lovers, and an indispensable companion for students and teachers of literature, this volume vividly brings alive each author’s personality and work, ingeniously bridging the gap between reader and writer.

Download or read book Metaphor and Diaspora in Contemporary Writing written by J. Sell and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-01-06 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Choose ten major contemporary diasporic writers (from Abdulrazak to Zadie), ask ten leading authorities to write about their use of metaphor, and this is the result: a timely reassertion of metaphor's unrivalled capacity to encompass sameness and difference and create understanding and empathy across boundaries of nationality, race and ethnicity.

Download or read book At Freedom's Limit written by Sadia Abbas and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2014-05-26 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The subject of this book is a new “Islam.” This Islam began to take shape in 1988 around the Rushdie affair, the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the first Gulf War of 1991. It was consolidated in the period following September 11, 2001. It is a name, a discursive site, a signifier at once flexible and constrained—indeed, it is a geopolitical agon, in and around which some of the most pressing aporias of modernity, enlightenment, liberalism, and reformation are worked out. At this discursive site are many metonyms for Islam: the veiled or “pious” Muslim woman, the militant, the minority Muslim injured by Western free speech. Each of these figures functions as a cipher enabling repeated encounters with the question “How do we free ourselves from freedom?” Again and again, freedom is imagined as Western, modern, imperial—a dark imposition of Enlightenment. The pious and injured Muslim who desires his or her own enslavement is imagined as freedom’s other. At Freedom’s Limit is an intervention into current debates regarding religion, secularism, and Islam and provides a deep critique of the anthropology and sociology of Islam that have consolidated this formation. It shows that, even as this Islam gains increasing traction in cultural production from television shows to movies to novels, the most intricate contestations of Islam so construed are to be found in the work of Muslim writers and painters. This book includes extended readings of jihadist proclamations; postcolonial law; responses to law from minorities in Muslim-majority societies; Islamophobic films; the novels of Leila Aboulela, Mohammed Hanif, and Nadeem Aslam; and the paintings of Komail Aijazuddin.

Download or read book The Wasted Vigil written by Nadeem Aslam and published by Random House India. This book was released on 2012-11-02 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marcus Caldwell, and English widower and Muslim convert, lives in an old perfume factory in the shadow of the Tora Bora mountains in Afghanistan. Lara, a Russian woman, arrives at his home one day in search of her brother, a Soviet soldier who disappeared in the area many years previously, and who may have known Marcus’s daughter. In the days that follow, further people arrive there, each seeking someone or something. The stories and histories that unfold, interweaving and overlapping, span nearly a quarter of a century and tell of the terrible afflictions that have plagued Afghanistan—as well of the love that can blossom during war and conflict.

Download or read book Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels written by Peter Childs and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-08-15 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fresh set of concerns face the twenty-first century British novelist. In this study of the four key novelists Zadie Smith, Nadeem Aslam, Hari Kunzru and David Mitchell, the the changes in narrative approaches and critical directions of a new post-1989 fiction are explored. Close readings of the writers are informed by a range of contemporary theorists, critics and commentators to reveal the emphases of twenty-first century fiction. Terror, fear, consumerism, multinationalism, and corporatism: the terms circulating in culture and social networks are evident in Smith's faith in ethical living, Aslam's consideration of multiculturalism, the novels Kunzru builds around the politics of identity and in the importance Mitchell places on the interconnectedness of human life. By putting the emergence of a new British literary dynamic in the context of ethical as well as global contexts, this study analyzes the transformed fictional perceptions of a world no longer defined by the stand off of super powers.