Rajiv Surendra is a Canadian actor, writer, painter, and chalk artist with Sri Lankan Tamil roots. After rising to fame for his role as Kevin G in the 2004 movie Mean Girls, he published The Elephants In My Backyard in 2016. The memoir explores successes and failures through a six year attempt at securing the … Read More
Following her debut book of poetry If They Come For Us, Chicago-based poet and screenwriter Fatimah Asghar is back with a new collection. Co-edited with Safia Elhillo, Halal If You Hear Me is an anthology of poetry from Muslim writers who identify as women, queer, genderqueer, nonbinary, or trans. Kajal caught up with Asghar shortly … Read More
Amrita Mahale is an aeronautical engineer by profession. She studied as the lone woman in her engineering class in IIT and she even wrote about female students experiencing the “imposter syndrome” in classes that are dominated by men. Her first book Milk Teeth, like her, stands out in the publishing scene of India. The blurb … Read More
Dove is a bestselling novel by Robin Lee Graham, a non-fiction narrative about sailing solo around the world at 16 years old, starting from San Pedro, California. It ends like a fairytale: he returns home with a wife and a daughter. I read it as part of my middle school curriculum and was so taken … Read More
There is strange fascination in pressing an old, yellowing bruise, still tender. It begs for repetition and simultaneously unsettles. Chaya Bhuvaneswar’s debut collection, White Dancing Elephants revels in this discomfort, veering through short stories ranging from the speculative to the queer, the mythic to the historical, the pleasurable to the sexually violent. Centering the voices … Read More
Fatimah Asghar’s much-anticipated debut collection of poetry spans the divide of Partition, community, loss, and love. Motion connotes a certain amount of freedom. It belongs in the air, in the depths of the ocean, in the fingertips of flames reaching for something greater, more infinite. But the movement of Partition relied on boundaries to restrict … Read More
In Marriage of a Thousand Lies, Lucky, the restless romantic, ruminates on queerness and notes that, “most people think the closet is a small room. They think you can touch the wall, touch the door, turn the handle, and walk free. But when you’re inside it, the closet is so vast. No walls, no doors, just empty darkness stretching … Read More
There is something particular about hearing the same stories repeated again and again by family members. A loving frustration. There are the looks shot between siblings, across kitchen tables, of “this again?” There is the conviction with which a grandfather or a mother or an uncle tells the story, each time like it’s going to … Read More
At Hindu weddings, a line of married women take their turns whispering words of wisdom in the bride’s ear. I’ve watched this tradition take place countless times, and recently I was visiting my parents when my mom divulged the secret at a dinner table conversation. Apparently, the women all say the same thing – akhand … Read More
There are many near deaths in Krystal A. Sital’s memoir Secrets We Kept: Three Women of Trinidad – her grandfather’s almost immediately fatal aneurysm, her mother’s car crash as a rebelling teen, her father’s suicide attempt during her parents’ courtship, her grandmother’s close calls after numerous, vicious beatings. While death is at the center of this … Read More
