The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack

The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack PDF Author: H.M. Naqvi
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 0802146864
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
The winner of the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature follows his debut Home Boy with“an unforgettable romp across love, life, and everything else” (Akhil Sharma, author of Family Life). Abdullah, bachelor and scion of a once prominent family, awakes on the morning of his seventieth birthday and considers launching himself over the balcony. Having spent years attempting to compile a “mythopoetic legacy” of his beloved Karachi, the cosmopolitan heart of Pakistan, Abdullah has lost his zeal. A surprise invitation for a night out from his old friend Felix Pinto snaps Abdullah out of his funk and saddles him with a ward—Pinto’s adolescent grandson Bosco. As Abdullah plays mentor to Bosco, he also attracts the romantic attentions of Jugnu, an enigmatic siren with links to the mob. All the while Abdullah’s brothers’ plot to evict him from the family estate. Now he must to try to save his home—or face losing his last connection to his familial past. Anarchic, erudite, and rollicking, with a septuagenarian protagonist like no other, The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack is a joyride of a story set against a kaleidoscopic portrait of one of the world’s most vibrant cities. “H.M. Naqvi’s remarkable Cossack is the Pakistani Falstaff, the Tristram Shandy of ‘Currachee,’ spinning yarns inside yarns, allusive, affirming, and grandly comic.”—Joshua Ferris, author of To Rise Again at a Decent Hour “Wild, wise, and tender . . . Every page in this book is a playground, and each sentence an absolute thrill and joy to read.”—Patricia Engel, author of The Veins of the Ocean “Completely original in form and sensibility.”—Ha Jin, winner of the National Book Award

The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack

The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack PDF Author: H.M. Naqvi
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 0802146864
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Get Book

Book Description
The winner of the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature follows his debut Home Boy with“an unforgettable romp across love, life, and everything else” (Akhil Sharma, author of Family Life). Abdullah, bachelor and scion of a once prominent family, awakes on the morning of his seventieth birthday and considers launching himself over the balcony. Having spent years attempting to compile a “mythopoetic legacy” of his beloved Karachi, the cosmopolitan heart of Pakistan, Abdullah has lost his zeal. A surprise invitation for a night out from his old friend Felix Pinto snaps Abdullah out of his funk and saddles him with a ward—Pinto’s adolescent grandson Bosco. As Abdullah plays mentor to Bosco, he also attracts the romantic attentions of Jugnu, an enigmatic siren with links to the mob. All the while Abdullah’s brothers’ plot to evict him from the family estate. Now he must to try to save his home—or face losing his last connection to his familial past. Anarchic, erudite, and rollicking, with a septuagenarian protagonist like no other, The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack is a joyride of a story set against a kaleidoscopic portrait of one of the world’s most vibrant cities. “H.M. Naqvi’s remarkable Cossack is the Pakistani Falstaff, the Tristram Shandy of ‘Currachee,’ spinning yarns inside yarns, allusive, affirming, and grandly comic.”—Joshua Ferris, author of To Rise Again at a Decent Hour “Wild, wise, and tender . . . Every page in this book is a playground, and each sentence an absolute thrill and joy to read.”—Patricia Engel, author of The Veins of the Ocean “Completely original in form and sensibility.”—Ha Jin, winner of the National Book Award

Home Boy

Home Boy PDF Author: H. M. Naqvi
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307459918
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
“Naqvi’s fast-paced plot, foul-mouthed erudition and pitch-perfect dialogue make for a stellar debut.” —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) They are renaissance men. They are bons vivants. They are three young Pakistani men in New York City at the turn of the millennium: AC, a gangsta-rap-spouting academic; Jimbo, a hulking Pushtun DJ from the streets of Jersey City; and Chuck, a wideeyed kid, fresh off the boat from the homeland, just trying to get by. Things start coming together for Chuck when he unexpectedly secures a Wall Street gig and begins rolling with socialites and scenesters flanked by his pals, who routinely bring down the house at hush-hush downtown haunts. In a city where origins matter less than the talent for self-invention, the three Metrostanis have the guts to claim the place as their own. But when they embark on a road trip to the hinterland weeks after 9/11 in search of the Shaman, a Gatsbyesque compatriot who seemingly disappears into thin air, things go horribly wrong. Suddenly, they find themselves in a changed, charged America. Rollicking, bittersweet, and sharply observed, Home Boy is at once an immigrant’s tale, a mystery, and a story of love and loss, as well as a unique meditation on Americana and notions of collective identity. It announces the debut of an original, electrifying voice in contemporary fiction.

The Politics of Common Sense

The Politics of Common Sense PDF Author: Aasim Sajjad Akhtar
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108226078
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
This work offers a refreshingly different perspective on Pakistan - it documents the evolution of Pakistan's structure of power over the past four decades. In particular, how the military dictatorship headed by General Zia ul Haq (1977–1988) - whose rule has been almost exclusively associated with a narrow agenda of Islamisation - transformed the political field through a combination of coercion and consent-production. The Zia regime inculcated within the society at large a 'common sense' privileging the cultivation of patronage ties and the concurrent demeaning of counter-hegemonic political practices which had threatened the structure of power in the decade before the military coup in 1977. The book meticulously demonstrates how the politics of common sense has been consolidated in the past three decades through the agency of emergent social forces such as traders and merchants as well as the religio-political organisations that gained in influence during the 1980s.

Karachi Vice

Karachi Vice PDF Author: Samira Shackle
Publisher: Melville House
ISBN: 1612199429
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
A fast-paced, hair-raising journey around Karachi in the company of those who know the city inside out - from an electrifying new voice in narrative non-fiction. Karachi. Pakistan’s largest city is a sprawling metropolis of twenty million people, twice the size of New York City. It is a place of political turbulence in which those who have power wield it with brutal and partisan force. It takes an insider to know where is safe, who to trust, and what makes Karachi tick. In this powerful debut, Samira Shackle explores the city of her mother’s birth in the company of a handful of Karachiites. Among them is Safdar the ambulance driver, who knows the city’s streets and shortcuts intimately and will stop at nothing to help his fellow citizens. There is Parveen, the activist whose outspoken views on injustice repeatedly lead her towards danger. And there is Zille, the hardened journalist whose commitment to getting the best scoops puts him at increasing risk. Their individual experiences unfold and converge, as Shackle tells the bigger story of Karachi over the past decade as it endures a terrifying crime wave: a period in which the Taliban arrive in Pakistan, adding to the daily perils for its residents and pushing their city into the international spotlight. Writing with intimate local knowledge and a global perspective, Shackle paints a vivid portrait of one of the most complex and compelling cities in the world, a city where the borders blur between politicians and gangsters and between lawful and unlawful, as dangerous new forces of violent extremism are pitted against old networks of power.

America

America PDF Author: François Busnel
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 0802149359
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
Today’s leading French writers offer their perspective of a post-2016 America in this collection of pieces from the bestselling French literary magazine. From Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America to the moveable feasts of the Lost Generation, France and the United States have long shared a special relationship, defined as much by romantic fascination as occasional incomprehension. François Busnel, host of the acclaimed literary talk show La Grande Librairie, seeks to bridge this gap with America, a journal of literature and politics conceived in the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump, now available to English readers for the first time. In this insightful collection of pieces from the magazine, Alain Mabanckou sketches the outlines of his Los Angeles, where he finds a sense of belonging far from his home country of the Republic of the Congo. Leïla Slimani considers the ways #MeToo is shaping a new discourse around consent on college campuses, and Philippe Besson takes an old-fashioned road trip through the American heartland as he drives from Chicago to New Orleans. Joël Dicker traipses through Yellowstone National Park on the lookout for grizzlies, while Alice Zeniter wanders the scorching streets of Las Vegas on foot. Featuring a poignant interview with National Book Award winner Louise Erdrich and original work in English by luminaries including Richard Powers, Colum McCann, and Laura Kasischke, America suggests a new way of understanding the enduring relationship between France and the United States, one that has never been read in quite this way before. From the streets of Manhattan to the Wyoming wilderness, across rural Pennsylvania’s Amish country to the bright lights of Hollywood, America takes us on a crisscrossing road trip across the country as it archives accounts of the administration of the past four years and offers a moving testament to the essential power of literature to unite in times of division. Praise for America “Busnel presents a fine anthology of essays originally published in the French quarterly America. . . . The writers’ varied approaches mean that, even for readers familiar with the issues at play, the pieces will be consistently entertaining. As such, an American audience should lap up this thought-provoking tour.” —Publishers Weekly “A form of sophisticated literary activism.” —Literary Hub “While we wait for the “great works” inspired by the Trump era, the novelists and reporters at America will continue to discover the country that elected him, painting a picture while leaving prejudice to one side.” —France-Amérique “A kaleidoscopic reading list of a divided nation.” —Columbia Journalism Review

The Scatter Here Is Too Great

The Scatter Here Is Too Great PDF Author: Bilal Tanweer
Publisher: Random House India
ISBN: 8184005067
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
The Scatter Here Is Too Great heralds a major new voice from Pakistan with a stunning debut—a novel told in a rich variety of distinctive voices that converge at a single horrific event: a bomb blast at a station in the heart of the city. Comrade Sukhansaz, an old communist poet, is harassed on a bus full of college students minutes before the blast. His son, a wealthy middle-aged businessman, yearns for his own estranged child. A young man, Sadeq, has a dead-end job snatching cars from people who have defaulted on their bank loans, while his girlfriend spins tales for her young brother to conceal her own heartbreak. An ambulance driver picking up the bodies after the blast has a shocking encounter with two strange-looking men whom nobody else seems to notice. And in the midst of it all, a solitary writer, tormented with grief for his dead father and his decimated city, struggles to find words. Elegantly weaving together a striking portrait of a city and its people, The Scatter Here Is Too Great is a love story written to Karachi—as vibrant and varied in its characters, passions, and idiosyncrasies as the city itself.

Stations of the Sufi Path

Stations of the Sufi Path PDF Author: Abdullah Ansari
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781901383355
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Stations of the Sufi Path: The one Hundred Fields (Sad Maydan) of Abdullah Ansari of Herat, is a key Sufi text and the first in Persian to address the stages, or stations, of the Sufi way. Its author Abdullah Ansari (396/1006-448/1056) is considered one of the greatest and most prolific of the Persian Sufi scholars, and his works constitute an important contribution to the intellectual history of Islam. His writings address both exoteric philosophy and esoteric understanding, and range from Qur'an exegesis to devotional invocations and biographies of the Sufis, from literature and poetry to civil morality and ethics, always emphasizing the divine law as well as the divine truth as the way toward understanding. The One Hundred Fields was written by a spiritual teacher to serve as a Sufi manual for guiding novices. Its clearly defined and detailed descriptions of each 'station' make this work an esoteric masterpiece, almost one thousand years old. that still invites the reader on a spiritual journey of self-discovery. Nahid Angha provides the first complete annotated translation into English together with a full introduction. It will be of interest to the specialist in Sufism as well as to the general reader. Book jacket.

Submergence

Submergence PDF Author: J. M. Ledgard
Publisher: Coffee House Press
ISBN: 1566893305
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Award-winning foreign correspondent’s cerebral spy novel-cum-love story exposes humanity’s tenuous hold on a vast and relentless world.

Modern South Asia

Modern South Asia PDF Author: Sugata Bose
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415307871
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
A wide-ranging survey of the Indian sub-continent, Modern South Asia gives an enthralling account of South Asian history. After sketching the pre-modern history of the subcontinent, the book concentrates on the last three centuries from c.1700 to the present. Jointly written by two leading Indian and Pakistani historians, Modern South Asia offers a rare depth of understanding of the social, economic and political realities of this region. This comprehensive study includes detailed discussions of: the structure and ideology of the British raj; the meaning of subaltern resistance; the refashioning of social relations along lines of caste class, community and gender; and the state and economy, society and politics of post-colonial South Asia The new edition includes a rewritten, accessible introduction and a chapter by chapter revision to take into account recent research. The second edition will also bring the book completely up to date with a chapter on the period from 1991 to 2002 and adiscussion of the last millennium in sub-continental history.

Central Asian Portraits

Central Asian Portraits PDF Author: Demetrius Charles Boulger
Publisher: London : W.H. Allen
ISBN:
Category : Asia, Central
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description