Tag Archives: Fiction

Reading Professor A N Kaul’s The Domain of the Novel I am reminded, as Professor Sambuddha Sen points out in his own brilliant introduction, of the acuity of Professor Kaul’s mind, the depth and breadth of his interpretations of a wide variety of texts and their contexts…

The quote above was a part of Barbara Kruger’s untitled work (a Photostat print) created in 1987 that depicts a woman’s fingers holding a light bulb and these words are inscribed on the artwork. The first line is in bold and clearly visible while the second line remains less conspicuous. With Exquisite Cadavers…

Out of Print: Ten Years: An Anthology of Stories is an interesting collection to say the least. A compendium of stories that have earlier been published online via the website of the same name—‘Out of Print’—it is perhaps ironic that these stories do ultimately find themselves in print. Nonetheless…

The Kali Project is a unique effort that curates poetry by Indian women from different parts of the world. Wide socio-economic disparities and violence against women, in forms both manifest and oblique, led to the need for a collective effort to resist insidious structures…

Pottekkat’s short stories partake ‘broadly speaking of both the romantic idealism and the grand and radical social vision embodied by his novels’, says PP Raveendran in his foreword to The Story of the Timepiece. This collection of 16 of the author’s short stories bears testimony to that comment…

Havan, the English translation of the novel by Mallikarjun Hiremath, is a well-told story. Mostly linear, the novel does veer off this track occasionally, to recall stories of ancestors, or perhaps to narrate a lore. In the Author’s Note, Hiremath speaks of his attraction to the Lambada tribe from his childhood…

Rumble in a Village is an entertaining addition to literary representations of twentieth century rural India. In some ways reminiscent of Sri Lal Shukla’s Raag Darbari, this novel is a collaborative effort of the Belgian born Indian economist Jean Drèze, and his friend and writer Luc Leruth…

A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully. (Benjamin, The Task of  The Translator 162)Distinguished writer, editor, memoirist, and translator, Poonam Saxena, wears many hats with élan. Besides launching Hindustan Times’s Sunday magazine, Brunch, her distinguished writing…

‘People put birds in cages for their own amusement. Well, I was like a caged bird. And I would have to remain in this cage for life. I would never be freed.’This quote is from Rassundari Devi’s autobiography, Amar Jiban. Written in 1876, this book is considered the first autobiography written by a Bengali woman. I mention this book because of the echoes that one finds occasionally…

A late bloomer, the Indian novel at the turn of the nineteenth century was a form in transition. As it started to edge away from the dominant themes of romance and domestic bliss, it became both socially engaged and self-conscious. Interestingly, these two divergent trends…

For detective fiction lovers September 2020 was a month of exceptional anticipation. Robert Galbraith a.k.a. Joan K Rowling was scheduled to launch the fifth novel in the Strike series. Given her outstanding reputation, the Troubled Blood predictably grabbed the headlines and quickly made it to the top of bestseller lists across the world…

Ways of Dying: Stories & Essays is the sixth publication  in the Aleph Olio series. Much like other works in the series such as Love and Lust, Notes from Hinterland, In a Violent Land, Ways of Dying is an ‘olio’ or miscellany of remarkable works of fiction and non-fiction, all of which harp on the sure companion of life: death…

Victory Colony, 1950 is the story of Amala and Manas, whose lives intersect in a post-Partition relief camp, unfolding multiple other refugee stories with them as the novel progresses. Bhaswati Ghosh’s novel begins with the tragic event of forced migration of people from East Pakistan, across the borders of India…

Angshu Dasgupta’s Fern Road is far removed from the leafy promise of its title. It’s a tender tough novel which records the growing up years of Orko, a sensitive child, who has an extraordinary sense of empathy. Listening to the story of the Titanic, he finds himself plunging headlong into the ocean in his imagination…

Thadangal is the second novel by MA Susila who has published several collections of short  stories and critical essays. In addition, she is an acclaimed translator. Her Tamil renderings of the legendary Fyodor Dostoevsky earned her many prestigious awards. She was a former Professor of Tamil and a committed activist for women’s issues in Madurai…

Leesa Gazi’s Hellfire originally came out in 2010 as Rourob, marking her debut as a bold voice in the tradition of women’s writing from the subcontinent. Hellfire engages with certain tropes that remain relevant and persistent contexts in conversations about gender and the complex legacies of patriarchy…

Throughout the arts, the human state of loneliness has been a theme that has been explored, analysed and taken refuge in, recurring throughout cinema, fiction and art. In Arupa Patangia Kalita’s collection of fifteen short stories, which is the English translation of her 2014 Sahitya Akademi winning…

‘Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.’—Hannah ArendtPerhaps the greatest achievement of Bitan Chakaborty’s collection of short stories The Mark (Chinha–in Bengali) is that it reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it…

Syed Muhammad Ashraf’s The Silence of the Hyena, is a collection of stories and a novella that offers observations and commentary on the variegated lives and emotions of animals and humans which are often difficult to differentiate. The stories present a complex scenario populated by figures…

‘Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.’-  Ezra PoundAs I began reading this anthology of poetry and prose, these lines by Ezra Pound seemed to reverberate across the entire volume of writings. In a new phase of world that we are living iere always exists a binary relationship between light and darkness—one remains incomplete if the other is not around…