Editor's note

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, IndiaPakistan and beyond with the year's best pieces on novels, novelists, serious seminal texts and fun pulp fiction. 

Clea Chakraverty

Commissioning Editor

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

'Uncovering' Elena Ferrante, and the importance of a woman's voice

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

Among Colombian Nobel winners and peace seekers, Gabriel García Márquez still looms largest

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

The ghosts of a literary Indian hill-station that haunt the writers of the present

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

Why does Pakistan's horror pulp fiction stereotype 'the Hindu'?

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

70 years on, Primo Levi's If This is A Man is still a powerful reminder of what it means to be human

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.