Short Stories

In Gracy’s Baby Doll: Stories, exploring loneliness and viewing translation as 'extended authorship'

The stories present, to a large extent, the dark worlds of lonely characters experiencing varying degrees of tragedy, depicted through a bleak and straightforward language.

The Souvenir Museum: Elizabeth McCracken's collection of short stories is a beautiful exploration of love, family ties

McCracken has delivered a lovely collection of stories loosely tied together by one theme — the bonds of family that fracture and heal as lives are led.

Haruki Murakami's new collection of short stories explores borders between reality, dreams and memory

At first, you are carried along in the slipstream of bizarre but plausible detail — a feat Murakami achieves through the use of banal, if not clichéd, language.

Anushka Jasraj on her short story collection Principles of Prediction, and fiction as a channel to transmit abstract ideas

The impossibility of communication, the beauty of mismatch, is probably one of the themes of the book, Anushka Jasraj tells Firstpost.

N Kalyan Raman on Salma’s writing style in The Curse, his approach to translating, and the lack of literary discourse

Salma doesn’t mince words, there is no modulation or playing down. She’s very even-toned but she doesn’t hold back, says N Kalyan Raman of the Tamil author's powerful style.

AfsanaBadosh ep 2: Listen to Premchand's 'Sawa Ser Gehun' | Presented by Firstpost and Jashn-E-Qalam

AfsanaBadosh, presented by Firstpost and Jashn-E-Qalam, celebrates the spirit of storytelling through narrations of the greatest Hindi and Urdu stories. This is Episode 2 — Premchand's 'Sawa Ser Gehun', as performed by Vicky Ahuja.

Friday Night Frights: A Brief History of Feeling Great

Even the most widely accepted version of events is blurry on what might have triggered the whole thing.

Friday Night Frights: Red, Shiny, and Ripe | A short story

No tomatoes were harmed in the retelling of this story.

Bringing Dhumketu to a new century: Jenny Bhatt discusses translating the pioneering Gujarati writer's short stories

In the early 20th century, Dhumketu was a household name, known for writing stories that departed from the heavy influence of Mahatma Gandhi's ideology to depict instead a village idyll, the simple joys and sorrows of a common person, and the everyday goings-on of a Gujarati home.

In Bhagwaticharan Verma's 'Atonement', a cat's scheming ways put a young bride on trial

'Atonement' is part of The Greatest Hindi Stories Ever Told, an anthology curated and translated by Poonam Saxena, featuring authors like Premchand, Bhisham Sahni and Usha Priyamvada.