The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook
What is Nisha Susan’s collection of short stories about? The clue is in the title – The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook is about what it means to be a woman and have your days so filled up with work and family expectations and dating apps that you simply forget to invent things like […]
Kith and Kin by Sheila Kumar
Sheila Kumar’s Kith and Kin is a collection of nineteen short stories centred on the Melekat family – an upper-caste Nair family from Kerala, all related through the matriarch Ammini Amma. In this short volume, Kumar explores how families might lead separate lives, but are ultimately bound together – in this case, by Ammini Amma […]
Separate Journeys : Edited by Geeta Dharmarajan
Separate Journeys, the new collection of short stories edited by Geeta Dharmarajan, is earthy and raw in its exploration of womanhood in multiple forms – as mothers, as daughters, as temptresses and sometimes, all at once. Separate Journeys begins with an exploration of motherhood in ‘Bayen’ by Mahasweta Devi and in ‘A Day With Charulata’ […]
Bhairavi by Shivani (Gaura Pant)
Bhairavi by Shivani is about contradictions – the traditional and the modern, the contemporary and the past, and even the doer and the observer. A young woman appears in a settlement of Aghoris, the Shaivite sadhus who practice death rituals. The leader of the Aghoris, Maya Didi, calls her Bhairavi, and holds her in her […]
A Full Night’s Thievery by Mitra Phukan
Mitra Phukan’s collection of short stories, A Full Night’s Thievery, is about very flawed people – the kind we all are ourselves. They are disloyal, untruthful, vengeful and not very nice; the nasties would make their nasty way through the world with no consequences. A darker Roald Dahl, if you will. A short story at a […]
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy is charming if a somewhat rambling tale of love and marriage. At over 1300 pages and 591,552 words, A Suitable Boy isn’t so much a novel with a plot, as much as a series of intersecting, meandering accounts of people’s lives in the social and political context of 1950s India. […]
Monsoon by Vimala Devi
Monsoon, Paul Melo e Castro’s English translation of Vimala Devi’s Moncao, is about divisions between human beings. Vimala Devi’s short story cycle was first published in 1963 and is set in Goa before it became an indivisible part of the Indian Union. Here is a Goa where Portuguese is still spoken by the upper classes, […]
