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Here is a collection of sixteen short stories including one by Ka Naa Subra­manyam himself. Not all are short stories—at least one is an epic in a terse form: Ramapada Choudhury’s Festal.

Short stories focus one or two facets of actual life, with spontaneous embel­lishments which should not, however, erode into verity. Whether short stories set the pace for diffusion of social think­ing, or it is the other way round, is hard to establish. It will be safer and more appropriate to surmise that these are mutually complementary. Viewed this way, Amrita Pritam’s Stench of Kerosene and B.K. Bhattacharya’s The Golden God­dess deserve to be adjudged as prototypes of contemporary short story writing.