Category: Books

Photo by Rahul Chakraborty on Unsplash Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions reimagines the epic Mahabharata through the eyes of Draupadi (Panchaali), a woman often reduced to myth, duty, or property. But here, her journey unfolds through spaces—palaces, huts, forests, even exile—that mirror the evolution of her desires, struggles, and eventual liberation. What we...

Photo by Ali Ahmadi on Unsplash Not all novels that wrestle with race do so explicitly. Some, like Zaina Arafat’s You Exist Too Much, move through themes of gender, sexuality, religion, and mental health—revealing how deeply they intertwine with the politics of race and belonging. At the center of Arafat’s debut is a Palestinian-American narrator...

Photo by Christian Agbede on Unsplash One of the most common questions people ask in movement spaces is: why do we need to talk about race, gender, and sexuality all at once? Isn’t that too much to hold? In her powerful book, Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements, Charlene A. Carruthers...

Photo by Olu Famule on Unsplash Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys is more than a story of two boys trapped in a brutal reform school. It’s also a study in masculinity — what boys are told to be, what they’re punished for being, and how friendship and vulnerability reshape those expectations. Through Elwood and Turner,...

Photo by Andras Vas on Unsplash When Dave Eggers published The Circle in 2013, some readers dismissed it as dystopian satire — a cautionary tale about a fictional Google–Amazon–Facebook mashup gone too far. But more than a decade later, Eggers’ world feels less like satire and more like a mirror. Mae Holland, the novel’s protagonist,...

Photo by Delia Giandeini on Unsplash Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble presents one of the most profound philosophical challenges to the traditional understanding of gender. Building upon Simone de Beauvoir’s foundational work, Butler delves into gender as a performative act, pushing the boundaries of the gender binary and asking us to reconsider how identity is constructed...

Photo by Emiliano Vittoriosi on Unsplash What does it mean to “become” a woman? Simone de Beauvoir’s famous line — “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman” — has never lost its relevance. But the more I sit with it, the more radical and heartbreaking it feels. In The Second Sex, Beauvoir doesn’t just...