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Loss and Laws and other Tamil Short Stories, a collection of Tamil short stories of Jayanthi Sankar and translated by Usha Nagasamy, is based on the observations and experiences of the author’s twenty-six years of life spent in fast-changing Singapore. The author has been writing for twenty years and has been hailed as a rapidly rising star with a very unique yet universal appeal in the Tamil literary space. There are seventeen short stories in this collection–all chosen from the ninety-nine short stories written by the author over a period of seventeen years. Each one of the short stories differs so much from the other in theme, mature storytelling as well as format that it can create interest and inquisitiveness in any reader.

Born and brought up in India, Jayanthi Sankar has been living in Singapore since 1990. She has been creatively active for the past twenty years in short stories, novels, transcreations and essays. Her short story ‘Read Singapore’ was widely recognized in the literary circles. She is writing more in English in the recent years. Having written primarily in Tamil, her short story collections have been short-listed three times for the Singapore Literature Prize.

Loss and Laws and Other Tamil Short Stories by Jayanthi Sankar

Anu Kumar‘s stories cover a wide terrain, in time and place. Some are set in India and others in anonymous and mysterious worlds set in the past and distant future.  Some stories have much of the old and changing India in them, where a woman runs away in a washing machine,  and a wife finds strange succour in a godman and his promises.  In ‘Preparing for the Riots’ a young boy notices how his childish rivalries with a neighbouring group of boys are rooted in an abiding deeper hatred.  ‘The Right Reason’ takes on  farmer suicides that are just a matter of numbers for government officials,  one of whom features again in the story, ‘Tale of a Corpse’, where a farmer’s protest turns him into an object of devotion.   ‘The Curator’ mingles present with the past, where a man encounters another looking for a statue of a fabled dancer.  ‘The Time Jonathan Went Away’ and ‘Summer in the City’ are set in cities of the future, where science has all the answers, yet  strange unexpected events still occur.  A lover leaves suddenly and a cat’s moods seem  suddenly too prophetic, and people disappear in a strange manner whether they are on a roller-coaster in a theme park or simply taking the elevator to the highest floor. In these stories, Anu Kumar has experimented with form, voice and style, hoping to explore the possibilities of the short story. Some of her favourite writers in this genre have been Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Haruki Murakami and Nirmal Verma.

Anu Kumar has lived in India and Singapore and presently lives in Maryland in the US. She has written for older readers and for children. The Girl who Ran Away in a Washing Machine and Other Stories is her second collection of short stories after In Search of a Raja and Other Stories (2002). She is presently in the MFA programme in writing at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, US. Her website is anukumar.org.

The Girl Who Ran Away in a Washing Machine and Other Stories by Anu Kumar

The idea of this book germinated when Dr. Usha Bande was reading the biographies of authors like Hemingway, Melville and R. L. Stevenson to teach a course. The thrill of adventures of these writers inspired her to read more such biographies, extract exciting episodes from their lives and rewrite them for young readers. The result is a collection of real-life stories that teach us how to survive and even enjoy life’s harrowing moments. These twenty stories of seventeen young dare-devils portray their uncanny adventures, their will to survive and to surmount difficulties but, more than this, acquaint us with their writing skills. These young people came back home and penned down what they had experienced – brush with death, an unexpected helping hand, the thrill of being alive. They are litterateurs and their writings have earned them laurels.

Dr. Usha Bande is an academic and critic by profession but a creative and journalistic writer by vocation. Usha Bande did her Ph.D. from Himachal Pradesh University, Shimla and post-doctoral research from University of Florida, Gainesville (USA). She is a prolific bilingual writer in English and Hindi. She has translated Marathi stories into Hindi and English. She has more than a dozen books to her credit; some of them are Violence in Media and Society; Culture, Nature and Literature, Ecology and Folk Traditions in Himachal Pradesh, a Coffee Table book entitled Forts and Palaces of Himachal Pradesh and Writing Resistance: A Comparative Study of Women Novelists.

Adventure Stories of Great Writers by Dr. Usha Bande

In this collection of short stories, Abha Iyengar brings us stories that are sometimes whimsical, but oftentimes serious and tragic, with undercurrents of sex and violence. Her stories explore the fragmented lives of those who are a part of the urban landscape and others who migrate from rural landscapes to join them and add to the fragments. The stories speak of women’s lives and their ideas of what constitutes self. Her tales are said to have the tone of fables, a certain visceral rawness, a rather poetic turn of prose, and mostly, ‘defy any easy genre classification.’

Abha Iyengar is an internationally published author, poet and British Council certified Creative Writing Facilitator. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, magazines and literary journals, both in print and online. She is a Kota Press Poetry Anthology contest winner. Her story, ‘The High Stool’ was nominated for the Story South Million Writers Award. She has won several literary contests. She is a member of The Poetry Society of India and Writing in India. She has contributed to popular anthologies like ‘The Simple Touch of Fate’, ‘Knit Lit Too’, ‘Chicken Soup for the Soul’ and The Indo-Austalian Anthology of Short Fiction. Her work has appeared in literary journals like Gowanus Books, Tattoo Highway, Tryst3, Bewildering Stories, Enlightened Practice, The Asian Writer, Door Knobs and Body Paint, Citizen 32, Arabesques Review among others.

The Gourdseller and Other Stories by Abha Iyengar

Horizon Afar is a collection of Tamil short stories written by Jayanthi Sankar and translator into English by P. Muralidharan.

This collection of short stories traverse beyond the contemporary life of Singapore on a quest to answer the eternal question, “What made life on this earth mechanical and devoid of meaning?” Presented here is a peek into the other side of modern life, opening new windows to the life and culture of various ethnicities of South East Asia.

Jayanthi Sankar is popular in the mainland just as amongst the writers of the diaspora. Her presence is totally absent in the stories themselves. The human side of Singapore, its students, the life of migrant workers and their aspirations to acquire resident status, interracial origins, lives of sex workers, cohabiting youth and many more such lucid narrations motivated me to translate them for English readers. The short story, “A Few Pages from Yuka Wong’s Diary”, on century-old cultural and political issues of China and Japan, is a unique work by any author of Indian origin.

Jayanthi Sankar has been creatively active for the past twenty-one years in short stories, novels, translation, transcreations and essays. Several of her books have been awarded by renowned organisations. Born and brought up in India, she has lived in Singapore since 1990. After Loss and Laws, Horizon Afar is the second collection of her Tamil short stories that have been translated into English.

Horizon Afar and Other Tamil Short Stories by Jayanthi Sankar

In this collection of short stories, strangers waiting at a bus stop take off on a magical journey.  Going home in the rain can mean taking unlikely detours.  A mother and son’s tour through a royal city becomes a journey of rediscovering each other. A lovely young mother crosses into the twilight zone beyond sweetness and light. Food becomes an instrument of torture in ‘Breakfast.’ Everyday situations and people reveal extraordinary facets. These radiant images range from warm and humane to poignant and chilling. They reveal the whimsy and playfulness, the raw edges, the heartbreak, and all things in-between that comprise what it means to be human.

Monideepa Sahu is a former banker who had a wonderful time writing her fantasy adventure novel for young people, Riddle of the Seventh Stone. She has also authored Rabindranath Tagore: The Renaissance Man. Her short fiction has been widely anthologized in India and abroad. She writes opinion pieces and feature stories on literature, art and culture forDeccan Herald and other reputed publications. She lives in Bangalore, India, with her extended family of people, a vintage PC, and countless arthropods. Connect with her at www.monideepa.blogspot.in.

Going Home in The Rain and Other Stories by Monideepa Sahu

Zafar Anjum’s Kafka in Ayodhya is the storyteller’s storybook. And what better guide than the famous existentialist to take you by the hand? The sojourner will discover the complex-bizarre in the conversations, the places, the atmosphere, the routine, and above all, the people. These are Kafkaesque characters flung into occasions where an absurdist sensibility seems opportune and knocking. You’ll encounter the archetypes, the questing, and the transformations. ‘Stories are found things,’ says one story, its wisdom line echoing through this splendid suite of story gems. The reader will relish the excavation of each tale’s sublime moments — these moments awaiting an unearthing, ‘like fossils in the ground’.

Zafar Anjum is a Singapore-based journalist, writer and entrepreneur. He has authored Kafka in Ayodhya and Other Short Stories (Kitaab, 2015), Startup Capitals : Discovering the Global Hotspots of Innovation (Random House India, December 2014), Iqbal: The Life of a Poet, Philosopher and Politician (Vintage Books/Random House India, 2014), The Resurgence of Satyam (Random House India, 2012), and The Singapore Decalogue: Episodes in the Life of a Foreign Talent (Red Wheelbarrow Books, 2012).

Kafka in Ayodhya by Zafar Anjum

War, loss, love, compassion, nightmares, dreams, hopes and catastrophes; this is literary Asia at its best. From a wide range of geographies spanning from Palestine to Japan, from Kazakhstan to the Malaysia, mobilizing a wide array of innovative narrative styles and writing techniques, the short stories of this anthology, carefully curated by one of Asia’s prominent and daring writers, will take you on a power trip of deep exploration of local (yet global) pains and hopes, a celebration (and contemplation) of humanity and its impact, as explored by 24 writers and 6 translators, many of whom identify with many homes, giving Asia what it truly represents across (and beyond) its vast territory, expansive history, and many traditions and languages. This book is an open celebration of multi-faceted creativity and plurality. The Best Asian Short Stories 2019 includes JOEL DONATO JACOB (Philippines) LANA ABDEL RAHMAN (Lebanon) RAZIA SULTANA KHAN (Bangladesh) DEENA DAJANI (Palestine) ALAN IRID FENDI (Syria) SAMIDHA KALIA (India) SCOTT PLATT-SALCEDO (Philippines) ANITHA DEVI PILLAI (Singapore) ANGELO WONG (Hong Kong) ODAI AL ZOUBI (Syria) SIMON ROWE (New Zealand / Japan) SEEMA PUNWANI (Singapore) VRINDA BALIGA (India) NAMRATA PODDAR (India / USA) T.A. MORTON (Irealand / Hong Kong) HAMID ISMAILOV (Uzbekistan) SUCHI GOVINDARAJAN (India) YD CHANG (China / Malaysia) JOLIN KWOK (Malaysia) IMRAN KHAN (Bangladesh) YAN TI (Taiwan) ZIRA NAURZBAYEVA (Kazakhstan) KAISA AQUINO (Philippines) JOSE VARGHESE (India)

About the Editors

Hisham Bustani, TBASS 2019’s editor is an award-winning Jordanian author of five collections of short fiction and poetry. He is acclaimed for his bold style and unique narrative voice, and often experiments with the boundaries of short fiction and prose poetry. Much of his work revolves around issues related to social and political change, particularly the dystopian experience of post-colonial modernity in the Arab world. His work has been described as “bringing a new wave of surrealism to [Arabic] literary culture, which missed the surrealist revolution of the last century,” and it has been said that he “belongs to an angry new Arab generation. Indeed, he is at the forefront of this generation – combining an unbounded modernist literary sensibility with a vision for total change…. His anger extends to encompass everything, including literary conventions.” Hisham’s fiction and poetry have been translated into many languages, with English-language translations appearing in prestigious journals across the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, including The Kenyon Review, The Poetry Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, World Literature Today, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. In 2013, the U.K.-based cultural webzine The Culture Trip listed him as one of Jordan’s top six contemporary writers. His book The Perception of Meaning (Syracuse University Press, 2015) won the University of Arkansas Arabic Translation Award. Hisham is the Arabic Fiction Editor of the Amherst College-based literary review The Common, and the recipient of the Rockefeller Foundation’s prestigious Bellagio Residency for Artists and Writers for 2017.

Zafar Anjum is a Singapore-based journalist, writer and entrepreneur. For eight years, he was the online editor of Computerworld Singapore, Computerworld Malaysia, CIO Asia and MIS Asia. He is the author of six fiction and non-fiction titles, including the best-selling The Resurgence of Satyam (Random House India, 2012), Iqbal: The Life of a Poet, Philosopher and Politician (Random House India, 2014) and Startup Capitals: Discovering the Global Hotspots of Innovation (Random House India, 2014). He is the director of Kitaab.org.


The Best Asian Short Stories 2019  (English, Paperback, Series Editor Zafar Anjum, Editor Hisham Bustani)

This is the second volume in the series, edited by Dr. Debotri Dhar, which contains well-crafted stories with innovative characters, gripping plots, diverse voices from 24 writers in 13 countries.

While Rakhshanda Jalil is a seasoned writer known to many in South Asia, Aditi Mehrotra is an aspiring Indian writer whose story delightfully juxtaposed textual passages and news clippings on women’s empowerment with everyday life vignettes of domesticity from small-town India. Martin Bradley’s story highlighted the intersecting themes of travel, historical memory, and communication across differences. Today, when latitudes shift, cultures collide, and we are all travellers in one form or another, in ways perhaps unprecedented, these stories must be told.

Contributors: 
Rakhshanda Jalil (India) Story title: ‘Diamonds are Forever’
Aditi Mehrotra (India) Story title: ‘Don’t Ask! Poocho mat!’ 
Martin Bradley (Malaysia; originally UK) Story title: ‘Bougainvillea’ 
Avery Udagawa (Thailand; originally US) Story title: ‘Festival Time.’ Translation of Japanese writer Mogami Ippei. 
Vanessa Ng (Singapore) Story title: ‘The Grey Thread’ 
William Tham (Malaysia) Story title: ‘At the Moonlit River’s Edge’ 
Rebecca Otawa (Japan; originally from Australia) Story title ‘The Rescuer’ 
Ananya Mahapatra (India) Story title: ‘The Bureaucrat’s Wife’ 
Zarin Virji (India) Story title: ‘Lola’s Honeymoon’ 
Anjana Balakrishnan (India) Story title: ‘For Chikki’s Sake’ 
Reba Khatun (British Bangladeshi) Story title: ‘The Attack’ 
Geralyn Pinto (India) Story title: ‘Cakes’ 
Greg Tan (Singapore) Story title ‘Mango and Sticky Rice’ 
Vrinda Baliga (India) Story title: ‘The Cosmic Dance’ 
Malini Gupta (India) Story title: ‘The Cycle’ 
Vineetha Mokkil (India) Story title ‘The Amulet’  
Migs Bravo Dutt (Singapore; originally Philippines) Story title: ‘Begin Again’ 
Anjaly Thomas Story title: ‘Lucas’s Story’ 
Somrita Urni Ganguly (India) Story title: ‘Boba’ Translation of Bengali Writer Banaphool blessed.
Hezreen Abdul Rashid (Malaysia) Story title: ‘Letting Go’ 

About the Editors

Debotri Dhar was educated in India, the United Kingdom and the United States. She holds a Master’s degree in Women’s Studies, with distinction, from the University of Oxford, UK, and a Ph.D. in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers University, USA, and is currently a visiting fellow and lecturer at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. Debotri juggles university teaching and academic research in the day with lively bursts of creative writing at night. Her short stories have appeared in literary magazines across the world, followed by the short story collection Postcards from Oxford: Stories of Women and Travel. The Courtesans of Karim Street is her second novel.

Zafar Anjum is a Singapore-based journalist, writer and entrepreneur. For eight years, he was the online editor of Computerworld Singapore, Computerworld Malaysia, CIO Asia and MIS Asia. He is the author of six fiction and non-fiction titles, including the best-selling The Resurgence of Satyam (Random House India, 2012), Iqbal: The Life of a Poet, Philosopher and Politician (Random House India, 2014) and Startup Capitals: Discovering the Global Hotspots of Innovation (Random House India, 2014). He is the director of Kitaab.org.


The Best Asian Short Stories 2018

The Best Asian Short Stories 2017 (Edited by Monideepa Sahu & Zafar Anjum)

32 writers. 11 countries. One anthology of its kind in Asia.

The stories in this anthology by Asia’s best known and well-respected contemporary writers and promising new voices, offer fresh insights into the experience of being Asian. They transcend borders and social and political divisions within which they arise. While drawing us into the lives of people and the places where they come from, they raise uneasy questions and probe ambiguities.

Explore Asia through these tales of the profound, the absurd, the chilling, and of moments of epiphany or catharsis. Women probe their own identities through gaps between social blinkers and shackles. A young Syrian mother flees from war-ravaged Aleppo into a more fearsome hell. The cataclysmic Partition of India and its aftershocks; life and death in a no-man’s land between two countries; ethnic groups forced into exile; are all part of the wider Asian experience.

Life flows on in the pauses between cataclysms, bringing hope. Fragile dreams spread rainbow wings through the struggle to succeed socially, earn a living, produce an heir, and try to grasp at fleeting joys and love. These symphonies of style and emotions sweep across Asia – from Jordan and Syria to Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Japan and Korea. Crafted with love, they continue to resonate after the last page.

As editor Moniddepa Sahu says, these stories come ‘from the heart of Asia, not from the Western perspective trying to make sense of the quaint and the exotic. The home-grown Asian identity runs as a strong undercurrent, with no need to explain and offer apologetic footnotes.’

The following are the contributing authors to the anthology:

1. POILE SENGUPTA, INDIA 2. FARAH GHUZNAVI, BANGLADESH 3. USHA K R, INDIA 4. ROCHELLE POTKAR, INDIA 5. SHOMA CHATTERJI, INDIA 6. JYOTHI VINOD, INDIA 7. YU MEI BALASINGAMCHOW, SINGAPORE 8. LOH GUAN LIANG, SINGAPORE 9. HISHAM BUSTANI, JORDAN 10. CLARA CHOW, SINGAPORE 11. SHASHI DESHPANDE, INDIA 12. SHIRANI RAJAPAKSE, SRI LANKA 13. SONIAH KAMAL, PAKISTAN/USA 14 PARK CHAN-SOON, KOREA 15. SUZANNE KAMATA ,JAPAN 16. JEREMY TIANG, SINGAPORE 17. SUBRATA SENGUPTA, INDIA 18. SHIKHANDIN, INDIA 19. FRANCIS PAOLO QUINA, THE PHILIPPINES 20. MOINUL AHSAN SABER, BANGLADESH 21. GEETANJALI SHREE, INDIA 22. AMIR DARWISH, SYRIA 23. SRINJAY CHAKRAVARTI, INDIA 24. WAN PHING LIM, MALAYSIA 25. N THIERRY, SINGAPORE 26. FAROUK GULSARA, MALAYSIA 27. SARITHA RAO RAYACHOTI, INDIA 28. GEETA KOTHARI, INDIA/USA 29. O THIAM CHIN, SINGAPORE 30. ILAKSHEE BHUYAN NATH, INDIA 31. MITHRAN SOMASUNDRUM, THAILAND 32. SIDDHARTHA GIGOO, INDIA 33. MURLI MELWANI, INDIA/USA

Language: English
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Kitaab International
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9789811149702, 9811149704
Edition: First, 2017
Pages: 456
About the Editors

Monideepa Sahu, editor, worked as a bank manager before veering off into writing. She has authored Going Home in the Rain and other short stories (Kitaab, Singapore), Riddle of the Seventh Stone (Zubaan, India) and Rabindranath Tagore: The Renaissance Man (Puffin, India). She lives a nomadic life, resurfacing in Indian cities like Bangalore and Bhuneshwar. Zafar Anjum, Series Editor, is a journalist and writer based in Singapore. He has authored Kafka in Ayodhya and Other Short Stories (Kitaab), Startup Capitals: Discovering the Global Hotspots of Innovation (Random House India), Iqbal: The Life of a Poet, Philosopher and Politician (Vintage Books/RHI), The Resurgence of Satyam (Random House India), and The Singapore Decalogue: Episodes in the Life of a Foreign Talent (Red Wheelbarrow Books).

Zafar Anjum is a Singapore-based journalist, writer and entrepreneur. For eight years, he was the online editor of Computerworld Singapore, Computerworld Malaysia, CIO Asia and MIS Asia. He is the author of six fiction and non-fiction titles, including the best-selling The Resurgence of Satyam (Random House India, 2012), Iqbal: The Life of a Poet, Philosopher and Politician (Random House India, 2014) and Startup Capitals: Discovering the Global Hotspots of Innovation (Random House India, 2014). He is the director of Kitaab.org.

The Best Asian Short Stories 2017 

Nameless Lanes is a collection of stories carefully and lovingly translated from Urdu. It includes the finest works of some of the best Indian writers of Urdu short stories in the twentieth century. All of them have passed away now, but their works live to reflect, each in its own inimitable way, the society in which they were created. The stories alternate between the inner world of the protagonists’ painful nostalgia, excessive psychopathological narcissism, spiritual subterfuge, the crisis of identity, and the outer existential realities of a society, ridden with class hatred, violence, destruction of human dignity, and in a constantly menacing flux of unpredictable circumstances, plunging the characters into the appalling dilemma of existence. Hussain’s translation is more than the rendering of a text from one language to another; it is the introduction into English of a completely different society and an array of human experiences exceedingly strange – a sobering manifestation of the vagaries and vicissitudes of life through which the characters in the stories struggle to survive.

Syed Sarwar Hussain teaches English at the College of Languages and Translation, King Saud University in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He has also published four books that include ‘Ideology and the Poetry of Stephen Spender’ (1988), ‘Despairing Voices’ (2011), ‘Ashes in the Fire’ (2012), and ‘The Eastern Brew’ (2013).

Nameless Lanes by Syed Sarwar Hussain

Brevity is the soul of wit, as William Shakespeare wrote in one of his longer plays, Hamlet. Flash Fiction, brief stories, have become one of the most exciting sub-genres of contemporary fiction. In This Will Only Take a Minute: Canadian Flash Fiction, Guernica Editions features short short stories by Canadian writers from six words to 500 words in length, short stories from across the entire spectrum of Canadian writing. and anything from stark realism to speculative fiction.