![Telling it straight Telling it straight](https://bookanista.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Sing_Backwards_feature.jpg)
Telling it straight
In dark times, it’s only natural for readers to seek an escape. So it’s no surprise that, to fill the tedium of society-wide lockdown in the darkest, saddest days I’ve witnessed since 9/11, many friends of mine have wiped their reading lists clean of brave and hard-hitting ‘literary’ fiction in favour of lighter genre fare....
![Lilja Sigurðardóttir: Caught in a trap Lilja Sigurðardóttir: Caught in a trap](https://bookanista.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Lilja_slider-290x290.jpg)
Lilja Sigurðardóttir: Caught in a trap
Iceland is a country that has loomed large in my imagination since I was a young child. My father was stationed on a United States military outpost near Reykjavík in the mid-sixties. Heavily pregnant and unable to return to Pakistan to be with her parents, my mother and older brother went to live with my...
![Cocaine and other addictions Cocaine and other addictions](https://bookanista.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Cocaine_feature.jpg)
Cocaine and other addictions
In 1920, at the age of just twenty-seven, a young Italian named Dino Segre, writing under the pen name Pitigrilli, achieved overnight success and notoriety with a book of short stories called Luxurious Breasts, followed the next year by the novel Cocaine, and a second book of stories entitled The Chastity Belt. Although he was...