I woke up today feeling annoyed. Not because it was only the middle of the week or because I was woken to consciousness by a single ray of sunlight that had found its way through a sliver of gap between the two halves of my dark purple curtain. The heat…

This is not a book review. Just like Julian Morrow in The Secret History, I wish every teacher would start their class by saying, ‘I hope we’re all ready to leave the phenomenal world and join the sublime?’. Here, Julian hints at how a classroom should be: an experience. It…

when we were young, our weekends were occupied with visits to our cousins’ houses. we were many — almost 20 — by relation, all first cousins to each other, but, all nothing less than siblings bound by the same blood and bones. on those weekends, our favorite cousin to visit was…

This piece is a part of the ‘To my mother’ series, which chronicles stories that we want to tell our mothers but are unable to, perhaps, because we fear their reaction or worry they wouldn’t understand. Or maybe because we are separated from them by distance, or by life and…

This is not a book review. What goes into your mind when you pick up a book from a dusty shelf of your favorite bookstore? The first thing that you probably see is the spine. It’s your first impression of the book. And if the name, in its well-designed font…

This is not a book review. If you would have told me I would still be writing about grief, even post The Year of Magical Thinking, I would not have believed you. I was done with grief, with reading about it. With thinking of it. But that’s not how life…

This is not a book review. The first time I had heard of Joan Didion was years ago, when as a teenager, I had become obsessed with the life (and the subsequent death) of Heath Ledger. In one of the interviews given by Michelle Williams after Ledger’s death, the interviewer…

This is not a book review. Maybe minor spoilers ahead. If you ask me, The Vegetarian by Han Kang is not about a person following the herbivore lifestyle or the meatless ideology, your definition of vegetarianism depending upon where you hail from around the world. If anything, the turn of…

This is not a book review. I am disappointed. Not solely because of this novel that has left subpar remains in my memory. I am disappointed because I realized that I have never written a bad review for a book before. In the nine years of my book review writing…