Karachi, You’re Killing Me!
Karachi, You’re Killing Me!

Author: Saba Imtiaz

Publisher: Random House India

Published: 2014-02-24

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 818400561X

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Ayesha is a twenty-something reporter in one of the world’s most dangerous cities. Her assignments range from showing up at bomb sites and picking her way through scattered body parts to interviewing her boss’s niece, the couture-cupcake designer. In between dicing with death and absurdity, Ayesha despairs over the likelihood of ever meeting a nice guy, someone like her old friend Saad, whose shoulder she cries on after every romantic misadventure. Her choices seem limited to narcissistic, adrenaline-chasing reporters who’ll do anything to get their next story—to the spoilt offspring of the Karachi elite who’ll do anything to cure their boredom. Her most pressing problem, however, is how to straighten her hair during the chronic power outages. Karachi, You’re Killing Me! is Bridget Jones’s Diary meets The Diary of a Social Butterfly—a comedy of manners in a city with none.

The Diary of a Social Butterfly
The Diary of a Social Butterfly

Author: Moni Mohsin

Publisher: Random House India

Published: 2011-10-01

Total Pages: 183

ISBN-13: 8184002211

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Pakistan may be making headlines—but Butterfly is set to conquer the world. ‘Everyone knows me. All of Lahore, all of Karachi, all of Isloo—oho, baba, Islamabad —half of Dubai, half of London and all of Khan Market and all the nice, nice bearers in Imperial Hotel also...No ball, no party, no dinner, no coffee morning, no funeral, no GT —Get-Together, baba—is complete without me.’ Meet Butterfly, Pakistan’s most lovable, silly, socialite. An avid partygoer, inspired misspeller, and unwittingly acute observer of Pakistani high society, Butterfly is a woman like no other. In her world, SMS becomes S & M and people eat ‘three tiara cakes’ while shunning ‘do number ka maal’. ‘What cheeks!’ as she would say. As her country faces tribulations – from 9/11 to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto—Butterfly glides through her world, unfazed, untouched, and stopped short only by the chip in her manicure. Wicked, irreverent, and hugely entertaining, The Diary of a Social Butterfly gives you a delicious glimpse into the parallel universe of the have-musts.

A Woman Like Her
A Woman Like Her

Author: Sanam Maher

Publisher: Melville House

Published: 2020-01-28

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 1612198414

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A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2020 "An exemplary work of investigative journalism." —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times The murder of a Pakistani social media star exposes a culture divided between accelerating modernity and imposed traditional values—and the tragedy of those caught in the middle. In 2016, Pakistan’s first social media celebrity, Qandeel Baloch, was murdered in a suspected honor killing. Her death quickly became a media sensation. It was both devastatingly routine and breathtakingly brutal, and in a new media landscape, it couldn’t be ignored. Qandeel had courted attention and outrage with a talent for self-promotion that earned her comparisons to Kim Kardashian—and made her the constant victim of harassment and death threats. Social media and reality television exist uneasily alongside honor killings and forced marriages in a rapidly, if unevenly, modernizing Pakistan, and Qandeel Baloch’s story became emblematic of the cultural divide. In this definitive and up-to-date account, Sanam Maher reconstructs the story of Qandeel’s life and explores the depth and range of her legacy from her impoverished hometown rankled by her infamy, to the aspiring fashion models who follow her footsteps, to the Internet activists resisting the same vicious online misogyny she faced. Maher depicts a society at a crossroads, where women serve as an easy scapegoat for its anxieties and dislocations, and teases apart the intrigue and myth-making of the Qandeel Baloch story to restore the humanity of the woman at its center.

Karachi Vice
Karachi Vice

Author: Samira Shackle

Publisher: Melville House

Published: 2021-09-07

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1612199429

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A fast-paced, hair-raising journey around Karachi in the company of those who know the city inside out - from an electrifying new voice in narrative non-fiction. Karachi. Pakistan’s largest city is a sprawling metropolis of twenty million people, twice the size of New York City. It is a place of political turbulence in which those who have power wield it with brutal and partisan force. It takes an insider to know where is safe, who to trust, and what makes Karachi tick. In this powerful debut, Samira Shackle explores the city of her mother’s birth in the company of a handful of Karachiites. Among them is Safdar the ambulance driver, who knows the city’s streets and shortcuts intimately and will stop at nothing to help his fellow citizens. There is Parveen, the activist whose outspoken views on injustice repeatedly lead her towards danger. And there is Zille, the hardened journalist whose commitment to getting the best scoops puts him at increasing risk. Their individual experiences unfold and converge, as Shackle tells the bigger story of Karachi over the past decade as it endures a terrifying crime wave: a period in which the Taliban arrive in Pakistan, adding to the daily perils for its residents and pushing their city into the international spotlight. Writing with intimate local knowledge and a global perspective, Shackle paints a vivid portrait of one of the most complex and compelling cities in the world, a city where the borders blur between politicians and gangsters and between lawful and unlawful, as dangerous new forces of violent extremism are pitted against old networks of power.

Delirious Delhi
Delirious Delhi

Author: Dave Praeger

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2011-12-01

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 9350295962

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'Delhi exists in a kind of quantum state: in Delhi, all things are true at once. When the Big Apple no longer felt big enough, Dave and Jenny moved to a city of sixteen million people - and, seemingly, twice that many horns honking at once. Delirious Delhi depicts India s capital as the two experienced it, from office life in the rising tech hubs to the traffic jam philosophy that keeps people sane in the gridlock leading to them. With only their sense of humour as their guide, Dave and Jenny set out to explore a city in which ancient stone monuments compete with glass-clad shopping malls to define the landscape. What follows is a top-to-bottom snapshot of a city in the thick of loud and accelerating change. Anyone new to Delhi will have their understanding of it magnified by this book. And anyone who already knows Delhi will appreciate this candid tribute to a city that 's everything to everyone at the same time.

The Prisoner
The Prisoner

Author: Omar Shahid Hamid

Publisher: Skyhorse

Published: 2015-03-10

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 1628725478

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An international literary sensation, this chilling thriller “exposes. . . a world so dark that readers will come away terrified” (Wall Street Journal, India). An American journalist has been kidnapped in Karachi, Pakistan, days before the American president is due to visit. Those responsible have promised to execute him on video on Christmas Day. With no other leads, Constantine D’Souza, a Christian police officer, must get his former colleague Akbar Khan, a rogue cop imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit, to help track down the journalist. But to do so, he has to navigate the streets of Karachi, where police corruption is a way of life and political motives are never what they seem. Caught between the United Front—the militant ruling party—and the Pakistani Intelligence Agencies, D’Souza is in a race against time to save a man’s life and the honor of the nation. Modeled on true events, The Prisoner is a fast-paced thriller that brings the byzantine politics and the moral ambiguities of justice in Pakistan to life. With a gritty authenticity based on personal experience, Omar Hamid reveals a society where corruption and extremism are commonplace, and the line between the good guys and the bad guys is never as clear as we would like. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction—novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Instant City
Instant City

Author: Steve Inskeep

Publisher: Penguin Books

Published: 2012-09-25

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0143122169

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"Morning Edition" cohost Inskeep presents a riveting account of a single harrowing day in December 2009 that sheds light on the constant tensions in Karachi, Pakistan--when a bomb blast ripped through a religious procession.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist
The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Author: Mohsin Hamid

Publisher: Anchor Canada

Published: 2009-06-05

Total Pages: 155

ISBN-13: 0307373355

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From the author of the award-winning Moth Smoke comes a perspective on love, prejudice, and the war on terror that has never been seen in North American literature. At a café table in Lahore, a bearded Pakistani man converses with a suspicious, and possibly armed, American stranger. As dusk deepens to night, he begins the tale that has brought them to this fateful meeting. . . Changez is living an immigrant’s dream of America. At the top of his class at Princeton, he is snapped up by Underwood Samson, an elite firm that specializes in the “valuation” of companies ripe for acquisition. He thrives on the energy of New York and the intensity of his work, and his infatuation with regal Erica promises entrée into Manhattan society at the same exalted level once occupied by his own family back in Lahore. For a time, it seems as though nothing will stand in the way of Changez’s meteoric rise to personal and professional success. But in the wake of September 11, he finds his position in his adopted city suddenly overturned, and his budding relationship with Erica eclipsed by the reawakened ghosts of her past. And Changez’s own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and perhaps even love. Elegant and compelling, Mohsin Hamid’s second novel is a devastating exploration of our divided and yet ultimately indivisible world. “Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America. I noticed that you were looking for something; more than looking, in fact you seemed to be on a mission, and since I am both a native of this city and a speaker of your language, I thought I might offer you my services as a bridge.” —from The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Karachi
Karachi

Author: Laurent Gayer

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 0199354448

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Argues that within the seemingly chaotic malaise of Karachi's politics, a form of "manageable violence" exists, on which the functioning of the city is based.

The Runaways
The Runaways

Author: Fatima Bhutto

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2020-08-18

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 1839760354

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"Dazzling. A novel that holds up to scrutiny a world of claustrophobic war zones, virulent social media and cities collapsing upon themselves, and then sets it down again, transformed by the grace of storytelling." – Siddartha Deb, author of The Point of Return Anita lives in Karachi’s biggest slum. Her mother is a maalish wali, paid to massage the tired bones of rich women. But Anita's life will change forever when she meets her elderly neighbour, a man whose shelves of books promise an escape to a different world. On the other side of Karachi lives Monty, whose father owns half the city and expects great things of him. But when a beautiful and rebellious girl joins his school, Monty will find his life going in a very different direction. Sunny's father left India and went to England to give his son the opportunities he never had. Yet Sunny doesn't fit in anywhere. It's only when his charismatic cousin comes back into his life that he realises his life could hold more possibilities than he ever imagined. These three lives will cross in the desert, a place where life and death walk hand in hand, and where their closely guarded secrets will force them to make a terrible choice.