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Category: Literary Fiction

  • The Thief’s Funeral: The Book Review Anthology of Short Fiction

    Various (Ed. Sucharita Sengupta, Uma Iyengar, Chandra Chari)Aleph Book Company, 2024 A book in which I have a short story—and there’s a slightly embarrassing back story to that. Apparently (I have no recollection of this, to be honest) back in 2020, during the Covid lockdown, The Book Review Literary Trust…

  • The Earth Quakes: Late Anti-Stories

    Subimal Misra (Tr. V Ramaswamy)Harper Perennial (an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers), 2024 (From my review for Open: The Magazine, here) Most of us, over the many centuries books have been in existence, have grown conditioned to a certain style that we expect from stories. A building up, a climax,…

  • Gulliver’s Travels

    Jonathan Swift First published anonymously Or, to give it its full name, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships. A mouthful, yes, that title, but it pretty much covers the basics: Lemuel Gulliver,…

  • The Greatest Malayalam Stories Ever Told

    Various (Selected and Tr. AJ Thomas) Aleph Book Company, 2023 (From my review for Open: The Magazine) In 1891, the Malayalam literary magazine Vidya Vinodini published a short story named Vasana Vikriti (‘Strange Stirrings’) by Kesari Vengayil Kunhiraman Nayanar. This, writes AJ Thomas in his introduction to The Greatest Malayalam…

  • Great Expectations

    Charles Dickens First published: Chapman & Hall, 1861 A bildungsroman (a coming-of-age story), Great Expectations was Charles Dickens’s thirteenth novel. Between December 1860 and August 1861, the book was published in a serialized form in Dickens’s own weekly publication, All the Year Round, and became a hit in the course…

  • Ghachar Ghochar

    Vivek Shanbhag (original Kannada); Srinath Perrur (English translation) Harper Perennial, 2016 Vivek Shanbhag’s most recent work, Sakina’s Kiss, has been doing the rounds of my social media feeds, and it reminded me (not for the first time!) that I still hadn’t got around to reading this earlier book of his.…

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