Nota Bene Ivan Vladislavić Flashback Hotel Archipelago Books South African writer Ivan Vladislavić offers this collection of dreamlike stories that highlights his surrealist writing style and imaginative voice. Flashback Hotel blurs the lines between dream world and reality but does so while relentlessly searching for tangible meaning and teachings within the absurd. Josephine Wilson Extinctions Tin House Books Winner of Australia’s Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2017, Josephine Wilson’s Extinctions intelligently defies expectations and unabashedly asserts itself as a masterful work of novelistic literature. Set distinctly in Australia, Wilson’s unique and intricately established characters come to life on the page, and their imperfections and traumas are portrayed naturally and honestly through her firmly grounded yet imaginative voice. reports devoted to street demonstrations against racism and police brutality. Luz, the somewhat innocent provincial young man who moved to Paris in search of a job, gets his first taste of tear gas and of charges by the CRS riot police. Overall, Luz’s lengthy graphic novel is a consistently amusing, sometimes moving account of the heyday of an irreverently satirical magazine, before it unwillingly became a worldwide icon. Edward Ousselin Western Washington University Huzaifa Pandit Green Is the Colour of Memory Kolkata. Hawakal. 2018. 64 pages. Huzaifa Pandit lives in Kashmir, India, a region under turmoil from two hostile nations that have kept this beautiful land locked in. Never a day goes by without shouts for “Azadi” (freedom) ringing out on the streets of this heaven on earth. Battles break out constantly between Indian security forces and gun-wielding “terrorists” or stone-pelting schoolgirls. Naturally, like any poet living in a contested land, Pandit’s poems also reflect this anguish. Pandit’s poetic journey, therefore, sends him in two directions, one toward a direct confrontation with the security forces like “Death in February,” where he writes, “Obituaries / that seek asylum from winter drought / in lost samovars of salted tea / at funerals to thirsty mourners.” Another way is to write of exiled poets like the Kashmiri English poet Agha Shahid Ali and spell it out: “I know I want to write a poem, but the futility of it / I can’t read, you can’t read.” “What does one do when plastic rainbows / pellet your lamenting lungs? / What does one do when amputated houses / grate against wilted coffins?” The bodies/coffins are really a nation torn asunder. These two distinctions set Pandit apart from the native and extranative Kashmiri poets, but, beneath the veneer of sorrow, he has a disguised sense of humor when he doesn’t talk about Kashmir at all in a poem entitled “Bedside Tales from Kashmir.” This is rare because his main concern is the Indian military and the besieged city of Srinagar where he teaches. In “Testimony in February,” he asks of the poet Ahmed Faraz, “We forgot your name / Won’t you silence our conversations?” For a poet living in a city under suppression by the Indian state, “Green is the colour of memory specked / with shades of yellow grey.” Pandit is emphatic that “The parchment of my heart / is empty, quite empty.” Ravi Shanker N Palakkad, India Reena Nanda From Quetta to Delhi: A Partition Story New Delhi. Bloomsbury India. 2018. 170 pages. The ethnic cleansing and mass migration of Hindus and Sikhs from the provinces that became Pakistan in 1947 form an important current of twentieth-century history. The events played a key role in shaping modern India. Many novels and stories have been published over the years that depict the atrocities, terror, and violence of Partition, on one hand, and the trauma of the survivors on the other. Reena Nanda’s new novel is a somewhat different slice-of-life memoir. Memory and family history intersect time WORLDLIT.ORG 107 Books in Review and space, and we are treated to a fascinating panorama of lost places and cultures from the vantage point of the author’s own family history. Centered on the character of Shakunt, the author’s mother (Nanda was born in 1945 in Quetta), the family saga traverses the years from before Shakunt’s birth—starting with the arrival of Shakunt’s grandparents as settlers in Balochistan—to the...