BookRising

Alyson K. Spurgas, Madhuri Sastry and Bhakti Shringarpure unpack the dark side of wellness, self-care and yoga industries. Celebrity wellness influencer Gwenyth Paltrow recently shocked the world with an ad selling real estate in Israel even as the settler colonial state’s genocide of Palestinians is being documented in real time. India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi instituted an International Yo...

Aruni Kashyap, Madhuri Sastry and Bhakti Shringarpure discuss the rapidly increasing presence of AI which is causing a cognitive vertigo. Love it, hate it, need it or resist it, there is no denying that the pervasive presence of AI in all aspects of life has caused an upheaval. It is easy to denounce the use of AI in technologies of warfare and to rail against the environmentally disastrous AI dat...

A book club discussion between Yassmin Abdel-Magied and Bhakti Shringarpure about her book At Sea. Buy the book here. At Sea is propulsive novel of ambition, greed, and the deadly fury of Mother Nature, as a female driller takes charge of an isolated offshore oil rig with an entirely male crew. When Zainab, an expert driller, is tasked with overseeing a high-stakes oil rig operation, she leaves be...

A live book club chat about The Extended Universe: How Disney Killed the Movies and Took Over the World (Haymarket Books, 2026) by Vicky Osterweil. Moderated by Sherry Zane. About the book: A provocative history of Disney’s rise to cultural dominance, pulling skeletons from the corporate closet to decode the political messages hidden in all of your favorite childhood movies. In The Extended Univer...

A book discussion on Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think by Ainehi Edoro. Moderated by Bhakti Shringarpure. About the book: Forests in fiction are often understood simply as settings, symbols, or remnants of a premodern past. Yet many African novelists have turned to the forest to experiment with worldbuilding and to imagine new futures. This groundbreaking book explores the life of the f...

Poet and writer Otoniya J. Okot Bitek joins Bhakti Shringarpure to speak about her novel We, The Kindling . A beautifully assembled symphony of women’s voices breathes life into the cruel, two-decades history of the war waged by the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda. Okot Bitek says that in a way she has always been working on this novel even if her first poetry collection might have been...

Writer Hamza Koudri joins host Bhakti Shringarpure from Algiers to talk about his debut novel Sand Roses. A historical novel about the semi-nomadic Ouled Nail group in Algeria, it focuses on the women who are trained as dancers—but are also forced into sex work by the community at an early age. The novel follows twin sisters, dancers Salima and Fahima, who eke out a living in the town of Bousaada...

Ainehi Edoro (Brittle Paper) and Bhakti Shringarpure (Radical Books Collective) discuss about the controversial New York Times' "100 Best Books of the Century list." A grandiose list claiming to represent the world and a diversity of voices, it happens to have 66 books by American and primarily white writers and only two African books, four Asian books and only 13 translated works. Ainehi and Bhak...

In Love and War: Collective Memory and the Self is our fifth conversation in a series centering the Warscapes anthology Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War (Daraja Press). Featuring Samina Najmi, Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, Beverly Parayno and Veruska Cantelli. Writing about war is often synonymous with writing about memory. Erasing narratives, stories and collective memory is the explicit agenda and th...

Poetry of Witness is our fourth conversation in a series centering the Warscapes anthology Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War (Daraja Press). Featuring Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, Jehan Bseiso and Meg Arenberg. What is the poet’s role in the event of the erasure of an entire people? Even as we deem certain acts of violence as “unspeakable” and “indescribable”? As the refrain “no words left” rings in our...

Wounds of War: Narrating Health and Healing is the third conversation in a series centering the Warscapes anthology Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War (Daraja Press). Featuring Zahra Moloo, Valerie Gruhn and Danielle Villasana. War brings the experiences and stories of health, health workers and emergency medicine into sharp focus. When one speaks about the horrors of war, it is primarily a referenc...

Gaslighting as Method and Ways to Resist It is the second conversation in a series centering the Warscapes anthology Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War (Daraja Press). Featuring Suzy Salamy, Suchitra Vijayan and Bhakti Shringarpure. Gaslighting is a term used to describe the process by which a person is manipulated into questioning their own reality. Defined as a "conscious intent to brainwash," gas...

Unlearning War in the Classroom is our first conversation in a series centering the Warscapes anthology Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War (Daraja Press). Featuring Sherry Zane, Veruska Cantelli and Bhakti Shringarpure. Wars, conflict and histories of violence have been continually framed as binary narratives between winners and losers, nation and non-nations, and armies and non-armies. Additionally...

Amrita Ghosh talks to Kashmiri scholar and academic Hafsa Kanjwal her new book Colonizing Kashmir: State-building Under Indian Occupation (2023). The episode presents Kashmir and its long conflict in a new narrative. Kanjwal resets the usual ways of understanding Kashmir’s past and looks at the immediate postcolonial years of 1950s and 1960s in which Kashmir was slowly integrated into India with v...

In our 12th episode of Radical Publishing Futures, Nadine El-Hadi, senior acquisitions editor at Hoopoe Fiction joins Meg Arenberg from her office near Tahrir Square in Cairo. The discussion focuses on the special position of Hoopoe and the American University in Cairo Press as a pioneering publisher of Arabic literature in English translation that is also located in the Middle East North Africa r...

Novelist, essayist and master trilogist Nuruddin Farah is one of the most important contemporary authors working today. In a writing career that spans more than five decades, Farah has published thirteen novels, dozens of essays and plays, all of which critically engage various dimensions of Somali history, culture and politics. Farah wrote his first novel From a Crooked Rib in 1970 and has not lo...

Cameroonian writer Léonora Miano joins guest host Greg Pierrot for the 10th episode of our Trailblazing African Feminists series. Miano was born in Doula, Cameroon and lived in France from 1991. She studied American literature at Nanterre university and this led her to African American and Caribbean writers that considerably influenced her work. She is the author of 16 books and the winn...

Radical Publishing Futures returns with a conversation between Meg Arenberg and director of Feminist Press Margot Atwell. Margot offers some perspective on the pioneering role of the Feminist press and its interdisciplinary journal  WSQ,  not only for radical independent publishing in the US but for women and gender studies as an academic field, as well as its ongoing relationship with t...

In the second episode of Color of Publishing, we focus on publishing perspectives from and about the United States with Elizabeth Méndez Berry (One World Books) and Porscha Burke (Random House). Host Bhakti Shringarpure engages the two experts in a wide-ranging conversation about book acquisitions, editorial processes, taste and culture-making, equity, and structural racism as it impacts the publi...

In the third episode of Color of Publishing, we focus on publishing perspectives from the United Kingdom with two prolific editors and writers, Margaret Busby and Ellah P. Wakatama. Host Bhakti Shringarpure engages the two experts in a wide-ranging conversation about the history of publishing in the UK, questions of diversity and representation, book acquisitions, taste and culture-making, and str...

On October 17th 2022, PEN America published a report titled “Reading Between the Lines: Race, Equity and Book Publishing” with the goal to expose and explore the fact that the publishing industry has “entered a moment of moral urgency about the persistent lack of racial and ethnic diversity among employees and authors.” In our three-part series focused on this crisis in publishing, we debrief list...

A quirky episode on ghosts, hauntings and horror on this week’s Mehfil. Two women writers from India and Pakistan interrogate ghostly encounters and how to write about them. Host Amrita Ghosh welcomes Jessica Faleiro from Goa (India) and Sehyr Mirza from Lahore (Pakistan) to explore the writing of ghosts, hauntings and horror on a personal level as well as with regards to collective traumas such a...

This Mehfil explores the exciting world of South Asian translation especially the regional and vernacular literature that has lately been garnering international attention and winning prestigious awards. In Translating South Asia, host Amrita Ghosh talks to two renowned translators from the neighboring countries of India and Bangladesh. The conversation is not only about translations from Bengali...

An exploration of the ways in which caste structures are rigidly enforced when it comes to food, water, eating and drinking in India. Food is usually seen as celebratory, as a source of cultural pride and as a symbol of nostalgia but today's Mehfil cuts through these ideas to foreground the pain that food, eating rituals, and culinary and gastronomic traditions can wreak upon Dalit communities. Th...

Indian popular cinema known as Bollywood has always been a dominant symbol of the nation. It constructs and legitimizes ideas of traditions, cultures and ethos, and most importantly, solidifies who gets to be Indian and who does not. In this episode, Amrita Ghosh welcomes Hussain Haidry and Alka Kurian to her mehfil to talk about a different India, one that we see represented in small, alternative...