The Hindu literary review has a lot to offer, as always. Here are some of my favourites from the new issue:

Anand on pictograms: “Another recent, surely ill advised, venture with creative pictograming was to place an image of an Indian goddess on the door to a women’s toilet; it was removed after the predictable furore.”

Rakhshanda Jalil on three books from Pakistan: “Arranged chronologically, the three books — Mumtaz Shah Nawaz’s The Heart Divided, Sara Suleri Goodyear’s Boys Will Be Boys: A Daughter’s Elegy and Sorayya Khan’s Noor — chart the history of the subcontinent through personal grief and tragedies and record the birth of three independent nations.”

Pradeep Sebastian examines the one-book wonder: “To write just one book and stop with that seems a failure of a kind. But reflecting on these one-book writers, I realise this needn’t always be true. Why not put everything you know — about life, about the writing craft, about character — into that one book? Perhaps that is how you write a really good book, perhaps even a great one.