The Coffee House of Lahore: A Memoir
K.K. Aziz
Before his death in July 2009, KK Aziz had accomplished one mission that he had set for himself, i.e. to write about the Lahore Coffee House, the glorious nursery of ideas. Luckily, despite his failing health, Aziz finished a draft that was meant to be a shining part of his autobiographical kaleidoscope.

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چراغوں کا دھواں
انتظار حسین
انتظار حسین کے بقول ان کے پاس دوسروں کی طرح ہجرت کی مظلومیت کی کوئی ذاتی کہانی نہیں تھی جسے بیان کر کر کے وہ لوگوں کی ہمدردیاں سمیٹ سکتے۔ لہٰذا انہوں نےتقسیم اور ہجرت کے بعد جو کچھ لاہور میں دیکھا، اسے بطور اپنی سوا نح کے بیان کردیا۔ اس طرح یہ ان کی سوانح سے زیادہ دوسروں کی سوانح ہائے حیات ہے۔ ادب کی، ادیبوں کی، ادبی پرچو ں کی اور ادبی تنظیموں کی۔
یہ کتاب تقسیم و ہجرت کے بعد سے لاہور کے ادبی منظر نامے کی تاریخ ہے، کون سا شاعر یا ادیب کہاں سے آیا، کہاں ٹھہرا، کہاں آسرا کیا، کس نے کیا کیا، کون کس کو پیارا تھا، کس کی کس سے ادبی چشمک چل رہی تھی، کس نے کون سا ادبی رسالہ نکالا اور کیسے نکالا۔ اور کس بڑے آدمی کی کیا “چھیڑ “تھی، کیا تکیہ کلام تھا؟پروفیسر صاحب سے کیا مقابلہ؟

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لاہور کا جو ذکر کی
گوپال متل
کئی سال پہلے بھوپال میں میرے ایک دوست نقاد نے ایک پروفیسر کی نثر کے بارے میں اظہارِ خیال کرتے ہوئے کہا کہ اختصار اور جامعیت اس کا وصف خاص ہے اور اس ضمن میں ان کا کوئی حریف نہیں۔ میں نے فاضل مقرر سے دریافت کیا کہ انھوں نے گوپال متل کی تحریریں بھی دیکھی ہیں یا نہیں ؟ حاضرین مجھے حیرت سے دیکھنے لگے کہ اُن میں سے بیشتر کمیونسٹ تھے، ایک نے استہزائیہ انداز میں پوچھا کہ متل صاحب کا ان پروفیسر صاحب سے کیا مقابلہ؟

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Lahore: A Memoir
Mohammad Saeed
PARTITION cast its shadow over many aspects of state and society. Yet the literature on this major event is mostly inadequate, impressionistic, and lacking in scholarly rigour. Even after 50 years of Independence and despite the access to wide-ranging primary source materials in libraries and archives, there are no convincing arguments that explain why and how the two-nation theory emerged, why and how different forms of identity and consciousness were translated into a powerful campaign for a Muslim state, why and when the Muslim League enlarged its constituency, and why the vivisection of the subcontinent created at least 10 million refugees and resulted in at least one million deaths.

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Lahore: A Sentimental Journey
Pran Nevile
I met Pran Nevile for the first and the last time almost a year ago in Lahore, his ancestral city, where he had been invited to talk about his much-celebrated book, Lahore: A Sentimental Journey, at the Faiz International Festival. First published in 1993, the book remains one of the most popular books written on the city. I had been asked to moderate the session that focused on the nonagenarian. At that time, I was still in the process of writing and researching my book on Lahore, thus I welcomed the opportunity to have a conversation with one of the city’s most famous sons.

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The Bargain from the Bazaar: A Family’s Day of Reckoning in Lahore
Haroon K. Ullah
Anyone who knows Lahore even a little will, in all probability, have visited Anarkali bazaar, the heart of the inner city where crumbling family homes lie a stone’s throw from the tight throng of shops, the tiny, tucked away mosques and the red light district. At another stone’s throw, past the commerce and street poverty, is the sparkling jewel of the Mughal era –the Badshahi mosque, as pristine as the day it was built. This iconic, ancient bazaar is the setting for Haroon K Ullah’s book, the subtitle of which – A Family’s Day of Reckoning in Lahore – comes nearer to its subject matter than its abstruse title. Ullah tells the story of an ordinary shop-keeping family, the Rezas, whose business lies in the depths of Anarkali.

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Imagining Lahore: The city that is, the city that was by Haroon Khalid
Haroon Khalid
This is a rare book by a young Pakistani writer that seeks to transcend the political, ideological and religious barriers that the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 entrenched in its physical geography and, more tragically, in the consciousness of its people. He tries to reconnect the interrupted stories of the city of Lahore as a place of fabled legends, of imperial grandeur, of revolutionary fervour and, more lately, of genocidal horror. Every landmark, whether lovingly preserved or lying forgotten in dilapidated ruins, becomes a peg on which the city’s history is retold.

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Waters of Lahore: A Memoir
Haroon Khalid

What the author describes as a “trilogy consisting of the Transfer of Power, Camelot by the sea, and Asian Drama Revisited,” The Waters of Lahore, a memoir by Kamal Azfar, is essentially a comprehensive political history of Pakistan.Starting with the inception and development of the idea of a separate country for the Muslims of South Asia to the general elections of 2013, the book is a well documented and researched text and reproduces several court judgments.

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The Dancing Girls of Lahore : Selling Love and Saving Dreams in Pakistan’s Pleasure District
Louise Brown

In The Dancing Girls of Lahore, Lousie Brown, an academic who works and teaches at Birmingham University in England, spends four years living amongst the women who work in Heera Mandi, a neighborhood and bazaar located in Lahore, Pakistan. It is also Lahore’s red light district. In the day, the bazaar is like any other in Pakistan, full of food stalls, small shops selling musical instruments and khussa, a traditional hand-crafted footwear, but at night, brothels located above the shops open for business.

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To Lahore, With Love
Hina Belitz

In The Dancing Girls of Lahore, Lousie Brown, an academic who works and teaches at Birmingham University in England, spends four years living amongst the women who work in Heera Mandi, a neighborhood and bazaar located in Lahore, Pakistan. It is also Lahore’s red light district. In the day, the bazaar is like any other in Pakistan, full of food stalls, small shops selling musical instruments and khussa, a traditional hand-crafted footwear, but at night, brothels located above the shops open for business.

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The Last Sunset: Rise and Fall of Lahore Durbar
Amarinder Singh
Ranjit Singh, the iconic Lion of Lahore, is no stranger to these parts. Though illiterate and only capable of putting his name down on a piece of paper, recorded fact and fictional literature acknowledge him as a man with a brilliant mind for governance, military strategy and social skills, albeit a man who was also manipulative and, at times crooked. Nevertheless, he stands out as the lone Indian ruler who, for 40 years of his reign, withstood western claims about the sun never setting on the British Empire. The Lahore durbar of Ranjit Singh was a citadel of resistance against the East India Company’s imperialistic designs.

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Lahore in the Time of the Raj
Ian Talbot
Ranjit Singh, the iconic Lion of Lahore, is no stranger to these parts. Though illiterate and only capable of putting his name down on a piece of paper, recorded fact and fictional literature acknowledge him as a man with a brilliant mind for governance, military strategy and social skills, albeit a man who was also manipulative and, at times crooked. Nevertheless, he stands out as the lone Indian ruler who, for 40 years of his reign, withstood western claims about the sun never setting on the British Empire. The Lahore durbar of Ranjit Singh was a citadel of resistance against the East India Company’s imperialistic designs.

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The Resourceful Fakirs
Fakir Syed Aijazuddin
The Sikh period (1799-1849) is probably the most interesting, and colourful, 50 years in the history of Punjab. After almost 777 years of foreign rule, starting from the Afghan invader Mahmud of Ghazni ousting the Hindu Shahi rulers until the time Maharajah Ranjit Singh entered the gates of Lahore, Punjabis had not ruled their own land. That moment is the starting point of the story of The Resourceful Fakirs, a book which dwells on how three famous Muslim brothers, Fakir Azizuddin, Imamuddin and Nuruddin, managed in the Sikh court of Ranjit Singh.

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