

Desi Books Ep 63 w/ Mishika Narula and Srisruthi Ramesh (guest hosts: Brown Girl Bookshelf) – Desi Books
Hello and welcome to Episode 63 of Desi Books—news and views about desi literature from the world over. I’m your host, Jenny Bhatt. Thank you for tuning in.
In today’s #FiveDesiFaves episode, we have Mishika Narula and Srisruthi Ramesh of Brown Girl Bookshelf sharing their recently-read favorite desi books by Anuk Arudpragasam, Rafia Zakaria, SJ Sindu, and Fatima Farheen Mirza.
#FIVEDESIFAVES WITH BROWN GIRL BOOKSHELF — INTRODUCTION
Mishika Narula is the lady behind the lens and leads partnership marketing at BGB. She is a champion of physical books over e-readers and finds it unnatural to text without perfect grammar. Outside of BGB content, she expresses her creativity best in the kitchen.
Srisruthi Ramesh is the head of strategy & design for BGB. She is also known to be an amateur philosopher, eye-balling cook and baker, elaborate storyteller, and to move to small remote towns on a whim.
The transcript of this episode will soon be up on the website at desibooks.co.
And now, here are Mishika and Sri with their #FiveDesiFaves.
#FIVEDESIFAVES WITH BROWN GIRL BOOKSHELF
[The conversation transcript to be added shortly.]At once a powerful meditation on absence and longing, as well as an unsparing account of the legacy of Sri Lanka’s thirty-year civil war, this procession to a pyre “at the end of the earth” lays bare the imprints of an island’s past, the unattainable distances between who we are and what we seek. Written with precision and grace, Anuk Arudpragasam’s masterful novel is an attempt to come to terms with life in the wake of devastation, and a poignant memorial for those lost and those still living.
Read the Brown Girl Bookshelf review on Instagram.
Read Jenny Bhatt’s NPR review of A Passage North.
Covering such ground as the legacy of the British feminist imperialist savior complex and “the colonial thesis that all reform comes from the West” to the condescension of the white feminist-led “aid industrial complex” and the conflation of sexual liberation as the “sum total of empowerment,” Zakaria follows in the tradition of intersectional feminist forebears Kimberlé Crenshaw, Adrienne Rich, and Audre Lorde. Zakaria ultimately refutes and reimagines the apolitical aspirations of white feminist empowerment in this staggering, radical critique, with Black and Brown feminist thought at the forefront.
Listen to a #DesiCraftChat conversation with Rafia Zakaria, guest-hosted by Mishika Narula and Srisruthi Ramesh.
Read Jenny Bhatt’s NPR review of Against White Feminism.
Traveling from India to the underground rock scene of New York City, Blue-Skinned Gods explores ethnic, gender, and sexual identities, and spans continents and faiths, in an expansive and heartfelt look at the need for belief in our globally interconnected world.
Read the Brown Girl Bookshelf review on Instagram.
Listen to a #DesiCraftChat conversation with SJ Sindu.
All the joy and struggle of family life is here, from Rafiq and Layla’s own arrival in America from India, to the years in which their children—each in their own way—tread between two cultures, seeking to find their place in the world, as well as a path home. A Place for Us is a book for our times: an astonishingly tender-hearted novel of identity and belonging, and a resonant portrait of what it means to be an American family today.
You’ve been listening to episode 63 of Desi Books—news and views about desi literature from the world over. I’m your host, Jenny Bhatt. Thank you for tuning in. Today’s #FiveDesiFaves episode was with Mishika Narula and Srisruthi Ramesh of Brown Girl Bookshelf sharing their recently-read favorite desi books. The transcript will be up soon on the website at desibooks.co.
Episode 64 will be up shortly. Follow on Twitter @desibooks, Instagram @desi.books, Facebook @desibooksfb. Please tag the accounts if you have requests or suggestions. Go to the website if you’d like to sign up for the free, weekly newsletter. You’ll get all the updates you might have missed as well as some new stuff. And please share this on via social media if you enjoyed listening or reading. Help raise the tide of South Asian literature.
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