She sits on stage dressed in black, smoking an e-cigarette, her blond, curly hair flowing down from her thick knit cap. The unrelenting Maria Alyokhina, a 37-year-old activist and performance artist best-known as a member of Pussy Riot, is presenting her new book "Political Girl: Life and Fate in Russia" in Cologne as part of the literary festival lit.COLOGNE. Maria Alyokhina is one of several women who staged a protest the evening before Vladimir Putin was reelected president of Russia
Ibtisam and her brother Raed Imran had come to Ramallah two days ago, after they got a call from Muhammad from the Israeli prison where he was held, telling them that he would be among the prisoners to be released to the West Bank. But when they arrived at the cultural centre on Monday, they were told that Muhammad was on the list, yes, but that he was among the more than 100 prisoners whom Israel had decided to exile from Palestine.
This is a novel of ideas, as well as, at its most elemental, a tangled love story. Desai's characters inhabit a complex post-modern, post-colonial world and, yet, her own sensibility as a novelist is playfully old-fashioned. Consider the contrivance Desai brazenly concocts to enable a central moment of this story: a chance meeting on an overnight train between the two title characters after they've each rejected their own families' formal attempts to arrange a marriage between them. Dickens, himself, might have blushed.
Cristosal, El Salvador's prominent human rights organization, has vacated the country due to increasing harassment and legal threats from President Nayib Bukele's government.