Guilt Trip and Other Stories is the latest collection of short stories by the bilingual writer, Lakshmi Kannan. What strikes a reader about her oeuvre as a writer in Tamil, English and in translation is the way she seamlessly captures fleeting life moments that foreground people and places at close quarters. In effect, she presses the pause button on the dynamic flow of life to highlight a unique perspective. In so doing, she creates a tableau that showcases an extraordinary moment in an otherwise mundane existence. The present collection is no exception.
Guilt Trip and Other Stories is a collection of eleven short stories and two long stories that traverses spatially across India as well as to the USA and UK. Temporally it covers at least three generations. Such a spatio-temporal expanse provides a canvas not usually captured in the short story genre. Against this background, Lakshmi Kannan weaves tableaux that foreground people, places and their interactions in unique perspectives.