Illustration by Joaquin Kunkel/Edited by Koh Terai

Here at The Gazelle, we work hard to bring you interesting, informative content that you can enjoy and engage with. But what do we read when we aren’t in production every Saturday, working late into the night? The Weekly Graze is a series in which The Gazelle’s staff members pick their favorite written pieces from the past week, in the hope that you might discover some interesting reads too.

Warda Malik News Editor

Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, Muhammad Hanif

In a country with a 96% Muslim population, the concerns of minorities are often left unaddressed. Muhammad Hanif attempts to answer the question of what it means to be a Christian woman in a patriarchal Muslim society. The book is set in modern-day Karachi and explores the intersection of gender, religion and caste. One of my favorite quotes from the novel is the following: “Now she has lived long enough to know that cutting up women is a sport older than cricket but just as popular and equally full of obscure rituals and intricate rules that everyone seems to know except her.” The misogyny that has come to categorize the everyday life of many women is hinted at in this sentence, and the author makes the reader understand the hypocrisy that Pakistani society shows towards the female gender at large. The novel ends in an ambiguous manner, but maybe that’s the entire point. We are asked to question the actions around us, because the questions leads to a quest for answers, and perhaps that quest matters more than discovering the answers.

Jocilyn Estes Opinion Editor

Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates

"The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant ‘government of the people’ but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term ‘people’ to actually mean. In 1863, it did not mean your mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me. Thus, America’s problem is not its betrayal of ‘government of the people,’ but the means by which ‘the people’ acquired their names.” — excerpt from Letter to My Son, The Atlantic.

This book was recommended to me by one of my professors last semester, and may be one of the most powerful modern depictions and critiques of racial structures in the United States. Written as a letter to his young son, Coates describes his experiences growing up as an African American with language that is as emotionally charged as it is forceful. Some have accused Coates of a kind of parochialism, but his story and his observations are powerful none the less.

Josefina Neder Deputy Features Editor

The Lover, Marguerite Duras

I recently finished reading this short experimental memoir and I felt my hair rising when I finished the last sentence. On the surface, The Lover is an impossible love story that happens in Vietnam between a 17-year-old girl and a Chinese man in his 30s. But deep down, this is Duras's attempt to portray and define her sense of self. It's crude, heart-breaking and very particular, but it shows love without any Hollywood sugar-coating.