short stories - Comfortably Numb

Book review: The Hive and the Honey by Paul Yoon

Tales of the Korean diaspora A sense of sadness, loss and regret runs through the seven stories in this collection which grapple with the themes of identity, belonging and escape, and casts a light on the experiences of the Korean diaspora. We see their lives play out not only in different parts of the world…

Book review: Mayadevi`s London Yatra by Bulbul Sharma

Human foibles, gently exposed The latest book from consummate storyteller Bulbul Sharma is a collection of old published tales and new stories. Here the story isn’t as much king as the characters are. Drawn up with an eye for delightful detail, each character — sweet, strong, eccentric, creepy — totally take over the story and…

Book review: This is Salvaged by Vauhini Vara

Rooted in reality Vauhini Vara’s debut, ‘The Immortal King Rao,’ a Finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, was, simply put, an amazing book. As a work of speculative fiction, it had an imagined world of impressive proportions. In this, her second book, a collection of short stories firmly rooted in reality, Vara changes…

Book review: The Blue Women by Anukrti Upadhyay

Compartmentalised lives Anukrti Upadhyay is back with a fresh cache of short stories that effectively proves her earlier acclaimed work Kintsugi was no flash in the pan. There are a dozen short stories in this volume, all of them imbued with the characteristic quietude we have come to associate with this writer. When things —…

Book review: A Case of Indian Marvels edited by David Davidar

A Case of Indian Marvels, edited by David Davidar. Aleph Books. Forty short stories from writers aged forty and under, says the blurb on the back jacket of the book. The stories have been handpicked by David Davidar, arguably one of the best connoisseurs of stories short and long, and the result is an anthology…

Book review: The Greatest Enemy of Rain by Manu Bhattathiri

Flaunting their foibles Over the course of the three books he has written, this one being the fourth, Manu Bhattathiri has become the Small Town Adept. He creates interesting characters who invariably live in picturesque hamlets in Kerala, at the edge of which a river runs, meanders or flows sluggishly. Not all these characters are…

Books: Learning to Talk by Hilary Mantel

LEARNING TO TALK, Henry Holt Books, is the just released US edition of a set of short stories Hilary Mantel wrote in 2003. There are just seven short stories in this slim volume but let me tell you something: it takes a long time to traverse the worlds in those stories, to digest the emotions…

Book review: Kintsugi by Anukrti Upadhyay

The gleam of a repaired heart Kintsugi is a collection of six short stories, all the characters linked to each other, some tenuously, some strongly. We meet Haruko, a jewellery apprentice of Japanese-Korean extraction in a jeweller`s lane in Jaipur, after which we go over to Tokyo, then Kyoto, to meet Meena, Yuri and Hajime….

Book review: The Women who Forgot to Invent Facebook and Other Stories by Nisha Susan

Snark Attack In her debut collection of short stories, Nisha Susan oscillates between the savage and the gentle, but never lets go of her trademark sarcasm It`s that expectations thing. It can`t be easy to be Nisha Susan debuting her book of short stories. That’s because Susan, co-founder of The Ladies Finger and Grist Media,…

Book review: Left From the Nameless Shop by Adithi Rao

Heart-warming tales of small-town life These are stories suffused with nostalgia for a quieter way of life. Lives intersect in manifold ways in Adithi Rao’s debut book of short stories, lives lived in the fictional small town of Rudrapura in Karnataka. And a leitmotif runs all through the narrative: a sense of nostalgia for a…