Siren Song: Understanding Pakistan through its Women Singers by Fawzia Afzal-Khan — Fawzia Afzal-Khan’s book is an important and timely feminist intervention in the study of classical music and a cogent challenge to the prevailing antisecular orthodoxy in the academy. In this complex and sensitive study…of the careers of artistes like Malka Pukhraj, Roshanara Begum, Reshma, and of the newer music and musical space offered by Coke Studio, Afzal-Khan shows us the multiple ways in which women performers negotiated and continue to negotiate their way through the numerous challenges thrown their way in the wake of the partitioning of the subcontinent and the multiple demands placed on them. Subjective Atlas of Pakistan Edited by Taqi Shaheen & Annelys de Vet — What and who do we talk about when we speak of ‘Pakistan’ and the ‘Pakistani’? This question was posed to more than eighty artists, designers, and other creative souls across Pakistan. They responded with maps, inventories, photographs, and drawings that explored the multifaceted microcosm of their real and imagined lives. Through these compelling contemporary cartographies, the Subjective Atlas of Pakistan offers a humanized vision of ongoing conflicts pacified through visual poetics of personal stories, fears, hopes, and dreams. The Silk Road and Beyond: Narratives of a Muslim Historian by Iftikhar H Malik — This book attempts to capture lived realities across Central Asia, Iran, Turkey, Spain, Italy, Morocco, Finland, Britain, USA, Palestine, Switzerland, Finland, and the subcontinent. It also aims at initiating readers into encountering Muslim heritage across the four continents where cultures share commonalities beyond the narrowly defined premise of conflicts. This book is an effort to capture history, literature, mobility, crafts, architectural traditions, and cultural vistas by focusing on diverse Muslim individuals, communities, cities, and their edifices. It attempts to reconstruct deeper and munificent aspects of Muslim histories and lived experience that often stay ignored by the writers and travellers. Do Meenar: Reportage by Masud Mufti — This work describes governance in Pakistan over three separate historical periods: (i) the good governance during the British period; (ii) still better governance by an idealistically devoted bureaucracy in the first decade of Pakistan’s independence, resulting in great progress by Pakistan; and (iii) deliberate destruction of good governance and bureaucracy by conscious designs of the various governments since 1958. The author has been an sound-witness of all the three stages. Patras kay Mazameen by Ahmed Shah Bukhari Patras — The essays in this book constitute a landmark in the evolution of humorous prose in Urdu. The individual essays contain various characters in comic situations, such as a very dull student or a henpecked husband. In contrast to the riotous and ribald Urdu prose of the 1920s, Patras developed a style that was as communicative as it was restrained. The quality that pervades the essays is a combination of humour and satire that keeps one enthralled. This edition contains the authentic and original text and has, in addition, three very rare reviews in which Patras combined the functions of literary criticism and humour.