Need a break from the nonstop world of international politics? We get it (hence our newsroom's short hiatus this August). This weekend, we invite you to explore the literature of Colombia, Italy,
India, Pakistan and beyond with the year's best pieces on novels, novelists, serious seminal texts and fun pulp fiction.
|
One of the questions most discussed on Italian social media is whether the same thing would have happened to a male writer who had made the same choice for privacy.
dawolf-/Flickr
Tiziana De Rogatis, Università per Stranieri di Siena
In her novels, in numerous articles and in correspondence, Elena Ferrante has chosen to depict the world from a female point of view. She has always claimed that the woman’s gaze is decisive.
|
Author Gabriel García Márquez – the first Colombian to win a Nobel prize, for literature – also dreamed of peace.
John Vizcaino/Reuters
Diógenes Fajardo Valenzuela, Universidad Nacional de Colombia
From the yellow butterflies of his 'Hundred Years of Solitude' to his Nobel acceptance speech, author Gabriel García Márquez remains ever present in his country's peace process.
|
The lychgate of the Camel’s Back Road Cemetery.
Anne_nz/Flickr
Arup K Chatterjee, O.P. Jindal Global University
Are the the hauntings at Landour just practical fictions amidst the solitude of the hills?
|
Dar Digest (story ‘Muhafiz’), February 2015. Free from the fetters of common natural laws, horror stories represent a society’s fears and prejudices.
J.Schaflechner
Jürgen Schaflechner, University of Heidelberg
Pakistani pulp fiction often portrays Hindu characters as evil demons and Muslims as heroes, an attempt to spread nationalist ideology.
|
The book provides an account of Primo Levi’s survival in Auschwitz.
Logaritmo/Wikimedia Commons
Nicholas Heron, The University of Queensland
The imperative issued by Levi’s text is not that one should persist in seeing the human in the inhuman. It is more like its opposite: that one bear must witness to the inhuman in the human.
|