Set in West Bengal, Aurko Maitra’s debut novella The Spider grapples with the human predisposition to violence, to unmediated crimes of rape and murder. Maitra has spent part of his career as a journalist in this state of east India known for endless political violence, which, like clockwork, occurs as local elections approach and politicians with deep pockets hire gangs of mercenaries to instigate riots and raid opposing Party strongholds. He has interviewed both victims and perpetrators in the area, and from these interviews, The Spider was born.
Category Archive: Fiction
It’s a brave step to have a coward as your protagonist but acclaimed author Vivek Shanbhag’s unlikeable creation proves to be a memorable device for exploring power, patriarchy and politics in contemporary India.
Fifteen years have passed between the publication of Hon Lai Chu’s 《缝身》 (“Seam”) and Mending Bodies, its English translation by Jacqueline Leung. Readers who feel those years mark a drift toward dystopia may detect the eerie touch of prophecy in Hon’s writing. Yet she also digs into human problems with neither expiration date nor borders.
It’s not every day one comes across a new novel about Jesus as a social activist, least of all one in translation from Malayalam. So Ministhy S’s recent translation of renowned Indian writer Benyamin’s 2007 novel, The Second Book of Prophets, is unexpected, to say the least. One need not know much about biblical stories or be religious—of any faith or none at all—to understand this story, although readers with some knowledge of the New Testament will be familiar with the characters and the plot. Yet as a novel, it’s engaging and even thrilling.
A midnight phone call can mean one of three things: a wrong number, a robocall or a terrible emergency. When suburban Bostonian, Claire Litvak receives a phone call from someone at the American consulate in Shanghai, it’s of the third variety: her daughter Lindsey is in the hospital on life support after she was hit by a drunk driver.
One More Story About Climbing a Hill: Stories from Assam is the latest book by renowned Assamese writer Devabrata Das. This collection of eighteen short stories, translated from the Assamese original, offers a unique and varied portrait of contemporary Assam. Remarkably, despite being translated by several individuals, including the author himself, the prose maintains a cohesive and consistent style throughout. Several stories deal with both Assam’s historical, and contemporary political challenges.
South Korea is famous for its workaholic culture: although things are slowly changing, white collar workers often feel pressure to work long hours and to satisfy every whim of their superiors in a rigidly hierarchical company structure. There is pressure to spend evenings at company dinners and even weekends hiking with the team. Among OECD countries, South Korea is ranked at number 5 for working hours, and at number 33 for worker productivity. The anthropologist David Graeber, author of Bullshit Jobs, would have had a field day studying Korean office workers and their creative strategies for seeming busy.
Pakistani writer Faiqa Mansab’s second novel The Sufi Storyteller is a South Asian take on stories about stories blended with a murder mystery. It opens with a murder in the library which doubles up as the office of the protagonist Layla, an expert on women and their role in storytelling traditions teaching at a university in Illinois. The naked dead body is that of a woman, has bruises on her throat, and is dressed in a red cloak. The problem is that this is the second dead body Layla has stumbled upon. As Layla searches her memory about the previous victim, she begins to realise that there is a pattern and perhaps some one is after her.
Few cities in the world can be as unknown to outsiders as Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, and The Book of Sana’a is the first major collection of Yemeni fiction in translation.
TS Eliot concludes his 1922 poem, “The Waste Land”, with three words: Shantih Shantih Shantih. This Sanskrit term for peace is the title of Daryl Qilin Yam’s novella that centers around the implausible idea of a quick snowfall in Singapore in the middle of the night when most people are still asleep. Yam weaves twelve interrelated stories around this snowfall, bringing together a dozen characters from various backgrounds who all find themselves awake at four in the morning.
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