Shakespeare scholar, Dr Eleine Ng (Singapore) reads from Tabish Khair’s Quarantined Sonnets: Sex, Money and Shakespeare. In powerfully […]
Tabish Khair
Noted actress Shabana Azmi, reads a short-story ‘River of No Return‘ written by Tabish Khair.
In words of the author,
“The story she reads out here is a story of violence and despair, but the fact that she found the time to make this brilliant recording is also illustrative of the other side of our human crisis: we are not just prisoners in the cells of our devastation. Not during the pandemic, and not afterward. There are ways to connect. There are ways to organize. There are ways to hope.“
Kitaab has published Tabish Khair’s anthology, Quarantined Sonnets: Sex, Money and Shakespeare, in support of Singapore’s Migrant Workers
In this ebook, in powerfully original rewritings that combine humour and satire with acute social and political commentary, Tabish Khair uses William Shakespeare’s sonnets to paint a memorable and moving picture of the world in corona quarantine. This is arguably the first major work of literature to come out of the corona crisis. With iconoclastic humour and intelligence, it runs the readers through a gamut of emotions. It is also a clarion call for change. These 21 sonnets range from initial humorous riffs on the foibles of our age but grow progressively darker and more acerbic, while always playing with Shakespeare’s original works. A must-read for our times!
Profits from this e-book are being donated by the publisher and author to Migrant Workers Centre, Singapore, helping migrant workers to cope with the current economic crisis complicated by the Novel Coronavirus pandemic.
The year 2020 is here and if you are reading this message, we thank you for being with us and wish you a very Happy New Year!
This year has a special significance for Kitaab: we celebrate our 15th anniversary. That’s a relatively long time in the life of a webzine in this day and age of short attention spans, isn’t it?
Well, we are not patting ourselves on the back but please allow us to take us down the memory lane for a while to appreciate why we feel how we feel at this juncture of time.
By Bina Shah In researching my previous column on the work of Elena Ferrante, I read how certain […]
By Tabish Khair The fun literary festival season has commenced in India. It will hit its peak in January, […]
Well-known poet, novelist and critic Dr. Tabish Khair has joined the editorial advisory board of Singapore-based literary website, Kitaab.
As a member of the board, Dr. Khair joins the ranks of some of Asia’s illustrious writers and editors such as Dr. Amitava Kumar, Kunal Basu and Anees Salim.
Born and educated in a small town of Bihar, India, Dr. Khair is the author of various books, including the poetry collections, Where Parallel Lines Meet (Penguin, 2000) and Man of Glass (HarperCollins, 2010), the studies, Babu Fictions: Alienation in Indian English Novels (Oxford UP, 2001) and The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness (Palgrave, 2010) and the novels, The Bus Stopped (Picador, 2004), Filming (Picador, 2007), The Thing About Thugs (Harpercollins, 2010; Houghton Mifflin, 2012) and How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position (Interlink and Corsair 2014).
His honours and prizes include the All India Poetry Prize (awarded by the Poetry Society and the British Council) and honorary fellowship (for creative writing) of the Baptist University of Hong Kong. His novels have been shortlisted for nine prestigious prizes in five countries, including the Man Asian Literary Prize and the Encore Award, and translated into several languages.
by Zafar Anjum THOUGH Hyderabad is famous for its biryani and pearls, it recently had a “taste” of […]
The moment we try to erase differences instead of accepting them, it creates problems. This is because human […]
The concluding session of the Hyderabad Literary Festival (HLF) strayed into the communal polarisation post-Babri Masjid demolition and […]
