Three Women


Lisa Taddeo - 2019
    Starved for affection, Lina battles daily panic attacks and, after reconnecting with an old flame through social media, embarks on an affair that quickly becomes all-consuming. In North Dakota we meet Maggie, a seventeen-year-old high school student who allegedly has a clandestine physical relationship with her handsome, married English teacher; the ensuing criminal trial will turn their quiet community upside down. Finally, in an exclusive enclave of the Northeast, we meet Sloane—a gorgeous, successful, and refined restaurant owner—who is happily married to a man who likes to watch her have sex with other men and women.Based on years of immersive reporting and told with astonishing frankness and immediacy, Three Women is both a feat of journalism and a triumph of storytelling, brimming with nuance and empathy. “A work of deep observation, long conversations, and a kind of journalistic alchemy” (Kate Tuttle, NPR), Three Women introduces us to three unforgettable women—and one remarkable writer—whose experiences remind us that we are not alone.

City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death, and the Search for Truth in Tehran


Ramita Navai - 2014
    It is a place where Mullahs visit prostitutes, gangs sell guns supplied by corrupt Revolutionary Guards, cosmetic surgeons restore girls' virginity and homemade porn is bought and sold in the bazaars. It is also the home of our eight protagonists, drawn from across the spectrum of Iranian society: the gun runner, the aging socialite, the porn star, the assassin and enemy of the state who ends up working for the Republic, the volunteer religious policeman who undergoes a sex change, and the dutiful housewife who files for divorce. These are ordinary people forced to live extraordinary lives. plotted around the city's pulsing central thoroughfare, Vail Asr Street, City of Lies is an energetic, intimate and unforgettable portrait of modern Tehran and of what it is to live, love and survive under one world's most brutally repressive regimes.

Dancing in the Mosque: An Afghan Mother's Letter to Her Son


Homeira Qaderi - 2020
    Frightened and in pain, she was once forced to make her way on foot. Propelled by the love she held for her soon-to-be-born child, Homeira walked through blood and wreckage to reach the hospital doors. But the joy of her beautiful son’s birth was soon overshadowed by other dangers that would threaten her life.No ordinary Afghan woman, Homeira refused to cower under the strictures of a misogynistic social order. Defying the law, she risked her freedom to teach children reading and writing and fought for women’s rights in her theocratic and patriarchal society.Devastating in its power, Dancing in the Mosque is a mother’s searing letter to a son she was forced to leave behind. In telling her story—and that of Afghan women—Homeira challenges you to reconsider the meaning of motherhood, sacrifice, and survival. Her story asks you to consider the lengths you would go to protect yourself, your family, and your dignity.

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China


Jung Chang - 1991
    Chang was a Red Guard briefly at the age of fourteen, then worked as a peasant, a “barefoot doctor,” a steelworker, and an electrician. As the story of each generation unfolds, Chang captures in gripping, moving—and ultimately uplifting—detail the cycles of violent drama visited on her own family and millions of others caught in the whirlwind of history.

One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter


Scaachi Koul - 2017
    Her subjects range from shaving her knuckles in grade school, to a shopping trip gone horribly awry, to dealing with internet trolls, to feeling out of place at an Indian wedding (as an Indian woman), to parsing the trajectory of fears and anxieties that pressed upon her immigrant parents and bled down a generation. Alongside these personal stories are pointed observations about life as a woman of colour, where every aspect of her appearance is open for critique, derision or outright scorn. Where strict gender rules bind in both Western and Indian cultures, forcing her to confront questions about gender dynamics, racial tensions, ethnic stereotypes and her father's creeping mortality--all as she tries to find her feet in the world.

Moranthology


Caitlin Moran - 2012
    These other subjects include...Caffeine | Ghostbusters | Being Poor | Twitter | Caravans | Obama | Wales | Paul McCartney | The Welfare State | Sherlock | David Cameron Looking Like Ham | Amy Winehouse | ‘The Big Society’ | Big Hair | Nutter-letters | Michael Jackson's funeral | Failed Nicknames | Wolverhampton | Squirrels’ Testicles | Sexy Tax | Binge-drinking | Chivalry | Rihanna’s Cardigan | Party Bags | Hot People| Transsexuals | The Gay Moon Landings

Dance Like a Man: A Stage Play in Two Acts


Mahesh Dattani - 2006
    Lata, in the meantime, nervously awaits the meeting between her parents and Viswas, the young man she wishes to marry. When the four meet, and in the conversations and discussions that follow, the fissures in the relationship between Jairaj and Ratna begin to explode into high-strung battles which lead back to their own youth and the tragedy that lies at the heart of their discord. The younger couple have their own issues to contend with: the obvious mismatch between the two sets of parents, the arguments over Lata's career as a dancer after marriage and, most unsettling of all, Lata's attempt to balance her parents' ambition with her own needs and desires. A brilliant study of human relationships and weaknesses framed by the age-old battle between tradition and youthful rebellion, Dance Like a Man has been hailed as one of the best works of the dramatic imagination in recent times.

The Magical Language of Others


E.J. Koh - 2020
    After living in America for over a decade, Eun Ji Koh’s parents return to South Korea for work, leaving fifteen-year-old Eun Ji and her brother behind in California. Overnight, Eun Ji finds herself abandoned and adrift in a world made strange by her mother’s absence. Her mother writes letters, in Korean, over the years seeking forgiveness and love—letters Eun Ji cannot fully understand until she finds them years later hidden in a box.As Eun Ji translates the letters, she looks to history—her grandmother Jun’s years as a lovesick wife in Daejeon, the horrors her grandmother Kumiko witnessed during the Jeju Island Massacre—and to poetry, as well as her own lived experience to answer questions inside all of us. Where do the stories of our mothers and grandmothers end and ours begin? How do we find words—in Korean, Japanese, English, or any language—to articulate the profound ways that distance can shape love? Eun Ji Koh fearlessly grapples with forgiveness, reconciliation, legacy, and intergenerational trauma, arriving at insights that are essential reading for anyone who has ever had to balance love, longing, heartbreak, and joy.The Magical Language of Others weaves a profound tale of hard-won selfhood and our deep bonds to family, place, and language, introducing—in Eun Ji Koh—a singular, incandescent voice.

Ramayana


Vālmīki - 1929
    The popularity of the book is so great that it has run into forty two impressions ever since it was originally published in the year 1951

The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death: Reflections on Revenge, Germophobia, and Laser Hair Removal


Laurie Notaro - 2008
    In The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death, she experiences the popular phenomenon of laser hair removal (because at least one of her chins should be stubble-free); bemoans the scourge of the Open Mouth Coughers on America’s airplanes; welcomes the newest ex-con (yay, a sex offender!) to her neighborhood; and watches, against her own better judgment, every Discovery Health Channel special on parasites and tapeworms that has ever aired–resulting in an overwhelming fear that a worm the size of a python will soon come a-knocking on her back door.

Days of Longing


Nirmal Verma - 1964
    The professional meeting explodes into an intense, passionate relationship. Prague in winter is a beautiful and moody setting to the feverish love affair. The complicated and inevitably short-lived romance is poignant and deeply moving in its telling by the master of the modern Hindi novel, Nirmal Verma.This book is translation of original novel in Hindi, called Ve Din.

Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found


Suketu Mehta - 2004
    He approaches the city from unexpected angles, taking us into the criminal underworld of rival Muslim and Hindu gangs; following the life of a bar dancer raised amid poverty and abuse; opening the door into the inner sanctums of Bollywood; and delving into the stories of the countless villagers who come in search of a better life and end up living on the sidewalks.

2 States: The Story of My Marriage


Chetan Bhagat - 2009
    Girl loves boy. They get married. In India, there are a few more steps: Boy loves Girl. Girl loves Boy. Girl's family has to love boy. Boy's family has to love girl. Girl's Family has to love Boy's Family. Boy's family has to love girl's family. Girl and Boy still love each other. They get married.Welcome to 2 States, a story about Krish and Ananya. They are from two different states of India, deeply in love and want to get married. Of course, their parents don't agrees. To convert their love story into a love marriage, the couple have a tough battle in front of them. For it is easy to fight and rebel, but it is much harder to convince. Will they make it?From the author of blockbusters Five Point Someone, One Night @ the Call Center and The 3 Mistakes of My Life, comes another witty tale about inter-community marriages in modern india.

Burned Alive


Souad - 2003
    In her village, as in so many others, sex before marriage was considered a grave dishonour to one's family and was punishable by death. This was her crime. Her brother-in-law was given the task of arranging her punishment. One morning while Souad was washing the family's clothes, he crept up on her, poured petrol over her and set her alight.In the eyes of their community he was a hero. An execution for a 'crime of honour' was a respectable duty unlikely to bring about condemnation from others. It certainly would not have provoked calls for his prosecution. More than five thousand cases of such honour killings are reported around the world each year and many more take place that we hear nothing about.Miraculously, Souad survived rescued by the women of her village, who put out the flames and took her to a local hospital. Horrifically burned, and abandoned by her family and community, it was only the intervention of a European aid worker that enabled Souad to receive the care and sanctuary she so desperately needed and to start her life again. She has now decided to tell her story and uncover the barbarity of honour killings, a practice which continues to this day.Burned Alive is a shocking testimony, a true story of almost unbelievable cruelty. It speaks of amazing courage and fortitude and of one woman's determination to survive. It is also a call to break the taboo of silence that surrounds this most brutal of practices and which ignores the plight of so many other women who are also victims of traditional violence.

The Accidental Prime Minister (The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh)


Sanjaya Baru - 2014
    Singh and Baru had been close and Baru, a great admirer of the technocrat who had ushered in the 1991 reforms, saw this as an opportunity to help a man he admired lead India down a new path. As Singh’s ‘eyes and ears’ and self-appointed ‘conscience-keeper’, Baru saw the transformation of Manmohan Singh from technocrat to politician. In his account, he tells his story of what it was like to ‘manage’ public opinion for Singh and how their relationship unraveled, while giving us a riveting look at Indian politics as it happened behind the scenes. Capturing the heady early days of UPA-1 to the high noon of the nuclear deal, The Accidental Prime Minister is one of the most important and intimate accounts of the prime minister and UPA-1.