The Shelf Life: Champaca Bookstore Blog
July Recommendations — Race & Immigration
Across the world right now, questions of freedom, citizenship, and human rights are reverberating. Race and racism are now central to many of these conversations, found in everyday instances of lived experience and embedded in societies and institutions as a whole. This month, we’ve compiled recommendations that speak to the experience of racism and the insider-outsider paradigm. We have chosen fiction, nonfiction, memoir, and poetry that talk of immigration and race in many of its forms. We find these books illuminating, at times heartbreaking and hopeful. We hope you like them too.
Book Review — Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Water Dancer”
This month, Kavya Murthy reviews Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Water Dancer. Read on for her thoughts about the book, and buy it on our online bookstore.
Books for Now — “A Word with You, World,” by Siddalingaiah
In our second Books for Now session, we spent time with the autobiography of Dalit poet Siddalingiah Ooru Keri in its English translation, A Word with You, World. Siddalingiah’s Ooru Keri, which was written in two parts in 1996 and the early 2000s. It was published in S.R. Ramakrishna’s translation by Navayana. Kavya Murthy recaps the event. Find the book in our online store.
June Recommendations — Pride Month
This year, Pride Month coincides with the phenomenal wave of protests in the US and the Black Lives Matter movement. It reminds all of us that Pride Month, which commemorates the Stonewall Uprising, was a brave fight against police oppression and brutality, and at its forefront were people of colour and transfolk. We celebrate Pride month in India now, so many years later, in our very different context. Let us remember its origins, and honour the many people who have paved the way for queerness to be a part of our social reality. But let us also remember that in India, we have a long way to go.
Book Review — Mohammed Hanif’s “A Case of Exploding Mangoes”
This summer Radhika Timbadia re-read Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes, and she thinks we should all pick it up. Read her review and buy the book on our online bookstore.