Pakistan

New Non-Fiction Books
New Book Announcement: “The Dark Side of News Fixing: The Culture and Political Economy of Global Media in Pakistan and Afghanistan” by Syed Irfan Ashraf
9 October 2021
This book provides a local journalist’s perspective on a four-decade long regional contribution to global news production. Fixers are local journalists hired to help global media outlets in developing news stories on wars. The book shows how the fixers’ risky news pursuits made possible for global media to access distant regions and dangerous caves on…
Read More New Book Announcement: “The Dark Side of News Fixing: The Culture and Political Economy of Global Media in Pakistan and Afghanistan” by Syed Irfan Ashraf
New Young Readers Books
New Book Annoucement: “House of Glass Hearts” by Leila Siddiqu
9 September 2021
Maera and her ammi never talk about the Past, a place where they’ve banished their family’s heartache and grief forever. They especially never mention the night Maera’s older brother Asad disappeared from her naana’s house in Karachi ten years ago. But when her grandfather dies and his derelict greenhouse appears in her backyard from thousands…
Read More New Book Annoucement: “House of Glass Hearts” by Leila Siddiqu
Podcast
Podcast with Samira Shackle, author of “Karachi Vice: Life and Death in a Contested City”
10 June 2021
A young man who turns his desire to join the army into a long stint as a volunteer ambulance driver. A teacher living in an old slum who is the only one brave—or foolish—enough to confront the gangs. A refugee who becomes a community organizer. A woman in a traditional village looking at the new…
Read More Podcast with Samira Shackle, author of “Karachi Vice: Life and Death in a Contested City”
Non-Fiction Reviews
“In Search of Lost Glory: Sindhi Nationalism in Pakistan” by Asma Faiz
31 May 202124 June 2021
Sindh, the “homeland” of the eponymous ethnic group, is in what is now Pakistan. In India, Sindhis often call themselves the Jews of India because they do not have a territory of their own, especially in a nation that is internally organized around linguistic ethnicities. Their request for things that other linguistic communities enjoy, such…
Read More “In Search of Lost Glory: Sindhi Nationalism in Pakistan” by Asma Faiz
Non-Fiction Reviews
“The Karakoram: Ice Mountains of Pakistan” by Colin Prior
6 April 20216 April 2021
The Karakoram Mountains, located for the most part in north-eastern Pakistan, contains four of the world’s fourteen 8000m peaks and four of the longest glaciers outside the polar regions. Photographer Colin Prior has been “fascinated” by the Karakoram for the better part of a half-century, and traveling there for a quarter-century, and it shows.
Read More “The Karakoram: Ice Mountains of Pakistan” by Colin Prior
Non-Fiction Reviews
“Karachi Vice: Life and Death in a Contested City” by Samira Shackle
26 March 2021
The title promises racy South Asia noir: what happened, who did it, and whether they got away with it. But Samira Shackle’s Karachi Vice actually concerns the lives of five people in that city, as violence—criminal and political—consumes everything around them. They receive no protection from the state as they go about their daily lives….
Read More “Karachi Vice: Life and Death in a Contested City” by Samira Shackle
Fiction Reviews
“Skyfall” by Saba Karim Khan
12 February 2021
Once home to the cultured, artistic world of courtesans, Heera Mandi is now a crumbling red-light district in Lahore. Raina is a young tour guide committed to fighting the injustice and violence now endemic there. But she’s part of the world she’s fighting: her mother Jahaan-e-Rumi works there; her father, Sherji, manages her mother’s career…
Read More “Skyfall” by Saba Karim Khan
Fiction Reviews
“The Black-Marketer’s Daughter” by Suman Mallick
30 December 2020
Zuleikha had an aptitude for the piano during her childhood in Lahore, but her black-marketer father could only afford an electronic Casio keyboard. Years later, her dream of owning her own proper piano comes about upon leaving Pakistan for an arranged marriage to Iskander, a US citizen and resident of Irving, Texas. So begins Suman…
Read More “The Black-Marketer’s Daughter” by Suman Mallick
Non-Fiction Reviews
“The Sikh Heritage: Beyond Borders” by Dalvir S Pannu
3 October 20203 October 2020
Minority communities in South Asia are fascinating examples of movement of ideas, people, and religion. After the 1947 Partition, Hindus and Sikhs migrated from the newly formed Pakistan to the world over, and especially to India. The conversations about war and peace between the two countries tend to revolve around Hindus and Muslims. The religion…
Read More “The Sikh Heritage: Beyond Borders” by Dalvir S Pannu
Fiction Reviews | Reviews
“Ship of Sorrows” by Qurratulain Hyder
16 January 202016 August 2020
Part memoir and part fiction, Ship of Sorrows, translation of the modernist Urdu novel Safina e Gham e Dil by Qurratulain Hyder, is a complex take on the representation of the Partition. Hyder uses the historical event to dwell on the intellectual and artistic angles of the act of living in an era that writers…
Read More “Ship of Sorrows” by Qurratulain Hyder
Non-Fiction Reviews | Reviews
“Surfacing” by Kathleen Jamie
10 September 201917 September 2019
Robert Macfarlane and Kathleen Jamie are the two most critically vaunted practitioners of the wildly fertile British publishing phenomenon known as “new nature writing”—though both reportedly resist that genre designation, and both are as much writers of history and human culture as of nature. Both explore these themes in similarly exquisite prose, but their tones…
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Essays | Fiction Reviews | Reviews
The many flavors of Jane Austen
8 July 20198 July 2019
When novelist Sonali Dev recently launched her new novel, Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors, she mentioned at her release party that it is one of a handful of Jane Austen rewrites with South Asian characters. It doesn’t take much to work out that Dev’s book is a take on Pride and Prejudice, and other authors…
Read More The many flavors of Jane Austen
Fiction Reviews | Reviews
“The Runaways” by Fatima Bhutto
31 May 201931 May 2019
Fatima Bhutto’s latest, powerful novel, The Runaways, highlights the whys and wherefores that drive young people to join such terrorist organizations as the Islamic State. Anita Rose and Monty live in Pakistan and Sunny resides in England, despondent, living with anxieties about their identity and their place in this world. When a propagandist radicalized narrative…
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Non-Fiction Reviews
“Fierce Enigmas: A History of the United States in South Asia” by Srinath Raghavan
14 October 201814 October 2018
The prolific American geopolitical analyst Robert Kaplan in his book Monsoon wrote that the Indian Ocean region is the new “pivot” of global politics in the 21st century. China’s emergence as America’s peer competitor in East Asia and potentially beyond has magnified the importance of South Asia in global geopolitics.
Read More “Fierce Enigmas: A History of the United States in South Asia” by Srinath Raghavan
Non-Fiction Reviews | Reviews
“Risalo” by Shah Abdul Latif, edited and translated by Christopher Shackle
18 July 2018
The Sindhi diaspora, whether in India or around the world, have a warm spot for the name Shah Abdul Latif, an 18th-century Sufi poet from Sindh, Pakistan, and a contemporary of the better known Punjabi Sufi poet Bulle Shah.
Read More “Risalo” by Shah Abdul Latif, edited and translated by Christopher Shackle

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