Kamal Al-Solaylee

Reading from Behind: A Cultural Analysis of the Anus barely hit bookstores in the United Kingdom this spring when it received its first accolade. The custodians of the 38th annual Diagram Prize added this academic exploration of the socially neglected but culturally pervasive human anus to their shortlist of the oddest book titles of the…

Its setting between Sri Lanka and Canada may suggest that The Hungry Ghosts is a book about dislocation and dispossession—a multicultural tale or a story of escaping strife in the homeland (and, for the record, it is all that)—but the dominant force in Shyam Selvadurai’s remarkable new novel is an internalized psychic struggle that transcends geographical or physical…

My introduction to William Shakespeare came in the Cairo of the late 1970s in a high school English class. The teacher, a liberal female in her late twenties, insisted that students buy a copy of The Merchant of Venice, in an abridged form, as an extracurricular text. Did she want to teach the group of impressionable Arab teens a lesson in the quality of…

With three novels (The Cripple and His Talismans, The Song of Kahunsha and, now, Dahanu Road) and three plays (The Matka King, Bombay Black and My Granny the Goldfish) since 2003, Anosh Irani is demonstrably not a victim of writers’…