Poet Patrick Phillips’s latest book, Elegy for a Broken Machine: poems, is a graceful meditation on grief and memory. The poems in this volume offer unflinching perspectives on illness and aging, and yet they are permeated by a subtle optimism, wisdom, and wit.

In Joshua Henkin’s latest novel, The World Without You (Pantheon, 2012) journalist Leo Frankel has been killed while covering the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. One year after his death, when Leo’s family gathers to commemorate his passing, his mother announces she is separating from his father.

For the past 20 years, author Pankaj Mishra has been exposing how India’s two main political parties have marginalized ethnic and religious minorities and failed to alleviate poverty in an era of rapid economic growth.

Hyder’s fiction reveals that the barriers separating seemingly distinct groups—Christians, Muslims, and Hindus; Europeans and Asians—are in fact hazy.

Poppy is responsible for an astounding 30-50% of Afghanistan’s GDP, a fact rarely discussed in media coverage of the war there. Last autumn, however, allegations about Ahmed Wali Karzai, the Afghan president’s brother, threw the war-ravaged Central Asian nation’s drug problem into the limelight.

The smell of wet garbage and puke permeates the 3:30 a.m. West Village air. Crossing the street to avoid a tipsy homeless man, I pass by some students jamming on a discarded piano, trying to conjure up the artistic frivolity and earnestness that has long since disappeared from this pocket of Manhattan.

The homes of middle class and wealthy Indians are staffed by teams of servants who cater to their employers’ every need. Born in poor states like Bihar or countries like Nepal and Bangladesh, these live-in drivers, cooks and cleaners often work twelve-hour days and seven-day weeks.

India’s pursuit of superpowerdom has been cheered on by the US media as well as the country’s own mainstream press, but writer Pankaj Mishra’s powerful portraits of the subcontinent pierce through this chauvinistic fog.

The world was introduced to Hanif Kureishi in 1985 when the film My Beautiful Laundrette debuted. The screenplay he wrote for it shed fresh light on class, race and sexuality in Thatcher’s London and was nominated for an Oscar.

Erudite and engaged, Clare Short has been a member of the UK Parliament since 1983. She has been one of the most vociferous critics of both the Iraq War and the Blair government’s ongoing support for it.

The mainstream media has its cyclopic eye on South Asia, broadcasting images of nerdy brown people stealing office jobs or the destitute and emaciated awaiting alms.

Pankaj Mishra and his latest work, An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004)

In Pedro Almodóvar’s 1983 film Dark Habits, a nightclub singer named Yolanda decides to kick her dope habit in a convent. But the nuns in charge of her rehabilitation are anything but pious. One is a lesbian heroin addict, another trips on acid, and a third writes smutty novels.

Brooklyn-based Suketu Mehta, a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, spent the late 1990s becoming intimate with the gangsters and zealots responsible for the violence, as well as the slum dwellers, cops, bar girls, and movie stars who make India’s thriving commercial capital function.

Michael Lally, author of over twenty books of poetry, has experienced much of what twentieth-century North America has had to offer—discrimination, Hollywood, sexual revolution and war.

More incisive than Dan Rather, more charming than Peter Jennings, Mexican-born Jorge Ramos is Spanish-language television’s celebrity talking head. An anchor at Univision, the fifth most-watched television network in the United States, Ramos is also a columnist and the author of several books, including The Latino Wave: How Hispanics Will Choose the Next President

In Las Cucarachas, author Yongsoo Park enters the consciousness of Peter Kim, an urban pre-teenager whose life is defined by stickball, racial boundaries and fist fights. The son of Korean parents, Peter is an ordinary twelve-year-old in 1980s Elmhurst who is crass and excessively hormonal, and who has an inevitable disdain for authority.

Just prior to the recent, momentous March for Women’s Lives in Washington, DC, the City Council issued an alarming report documenting the impact the attack on abortion rights is having here in New York City.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar stars as the protagonist and narrator of Imad Rahman’s debut collection of stories I Dream of Microwaves. He’s a struggling method actor who drinks bourbon like water and has a predilection for the word “dude.” When he’s not portraying ethnic criminals on America’s Most Wanted or struggling for the lead in a musical version of Apocalypse Now for dinner theater, he works in an assortment of jobs that call into question his dignity, but never his dedication or integrity as an actor.

It’s a Wednesday night at Manhattan’s smoky Kush bar, and off in a corner spinning music is resident DJ Karsh Kale.

After first reading Hanif Kureishi’s new novel The Body, I thought it to be an anomaly in a career marked by iconoclastic writing. After all, the book is a work of science fiction and at times it reads like a thriller.

Meera Nair’s debut collection Video (Random House 2003) is set in modern-day India, Bangladesh and the United States. In these 10 stories, Nair’s characters are affected by Hindu-Muslim communal violence, politics, social reform, and above all, different forms of longing. In the collection’s title story,

Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake (Houghton Mifflin 2003). A crowd buzzed with anticipation at the Barnes and Noble in Union Square on an evening in mid-September. Jhumpa Lahiri was going to open her book tour here, promoting her first novel, The Namesake. Among the typical mix of Indophiles, South Asian Americans and book nerds, there were lawyers, teachers and students of all ages.