An SAF Book Club meetup to talk about dystopian literary titles such as The Book Censor’s Library by Bothayna Al-Essa, Vauhini Vara's Immortal King Rao and the granddaddy of the general, Orwell's 1984. You're also welcome to bring your own [ ... ]
Anyone who has read The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years by Chingiz Aitmatov is free to take part in this book club meetup – attendees will each get the chance to express their impressions, then a moderator will [ ... ]
Another good-looking subject for a Sharjah Art Foundation meetup. The discussion will include Sabrina DeTurk's Women and Contemporary Art in the Gulf, The Development of An Art History in the UAE by Sophie Kazan Makhlouf and But We Cannot See [ ... ]
The House of Wisdom in Sharjah is running a new season of its Book Club under the theme 'Home', with three very relevant titles – House of Stone by war correspondent Anthony Shadid, Near to the Wild Heart by Brazilian [ ... ]
Held during Focal Point, Sharjah Art Foundation’s annual art book fair, this special session of SAF's always interesting book club looks at the realities of contemporary publishing from independent presses to shifts in digital technology via AI and self-publishing.
February's Reading Village selection is a beefy one – Kiran Desai's The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, described by the organisers as "sprawling, layered, and unapologetically thick" and shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize. Meet at the excellent Batliwala & [ ... ]
Anyone who has read Clark’s sweeping but very accessible vision of cognitive science is free to join this Dubai Bibliophiles Book Club meetup. It’s a great choice: the key takeaway – experience itself is a kind of controlled hallucination because [ ... ]
A discussion of Sophie Kazan Makhlouf's excellent exploration of contemporary art in the Emirates, led by Kutubna's founder and director Shatha Almutawa and Nora Qudah, curator of art exhibitions at Kutubna. Free to members; others pay AED 25.
Existential humour and comic absurdity from the Douglas Adams classic. A fun discussion seems guaranteed ...
You can't really go wrong with a classic like Herman Melville's quizzical short story. What exactly is going on here? Of course you could always take refuge in The New York Times summary of "a quintessential New York book" that [ ... ]
RF Kuang's 2023 satire of racial diversity, cultural appropriation and plagiarism in the publishing industry garnered some mixed reviews; the Washington Post was particularly critical of the main character (lacked depth) and the depictions of publishing (perfunctory). Our own view [ ... ]
His publishers rejected Giovanni's Room as a failure, telling James Baldwin the novel would damage his reputation. Knopf claimed the judgement was nothing to do with the book’s content, but Baldwin was convinced that the publisher didn't want "a story [ ... ]
Lea Ypi's colourful, hectic coming-of-age story through the end Communism in the Balkans, published in 1922, has won several awards, made the shortlist for many more, and features on several 'Best Book of the Year' lists. The shock felt by [ ... ]
Subtitled 'An Old Man, A Young Man and Life's Greatest Lesson, this 1997 memoir by the award-winning sports columnist Mitch Albom is based on a series of Tuesday visits he made to his former sociology professor, Morrie Schwartz, as Schwartz [ ... ]
Another really interesting pick by Book Cellar. The authors – software engineer and writer Kevin Simler and economics professor Robin Hanson – start from the premise that we are often unaware of the real reasons for our behaviours: they go [ ... ]
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