rk narayan
algudi Days is a collection of short stories by R. K. Narayan published in 1943 by Indian Thought Publications. The book was republished outside India in 1982 by Penguin Classics. The book includes 32 stories, all set in the fictional town of Malgudi, located in South India.
Ruskin Bond (born 19 May 1934) is an Indian author of British descent. He lives with his adopted family in Landour, Mussoorie, India. The Indian Council for Child Education has recognised his role in the growth of children's literature in India.
anpat Rai Shrivastava 31 July 1880 - 8 October 1936), better known by his pen name Munshi Premchand (pronounced [mʊnʃiː preːm t͡ʃənd̪] (listen), was an Indian writer famous for his modern Hindustani literature. He is one of the most celebrated writers of the Indian subcontinent, and is regarded as one of the foremost Hindi writers of the early twentieth century. His novels include Godaan, Karmabhoomi, Gaban, Mansarovar, Idgah. He published his first collection of five short stories in 1907 i
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aikom Muhammad Basheer is regarded as one of the prominent literary figures ever existed in india. He was a legend in Kerala. He was one of those outspoken figures who revolutionized Malayalam Literature, and Thus the World Literature itself with his dauntless sarcasm, satire, and black humor. Jul 5 1994
Saadat Hasan Manto (/mɑːn, -tɒ/; Urdu: سعادت حسن منٹو, pronounced [sa'ādat 'hasan 'maṅṭō]; 11
May 1912 – 18 January 1955) was a Pakistani writer, playwright and author born in Ludhiana,
British India.[2] Writing mainly in the Urdu language, he produced 22 collections of short stories,
a novel, five series of radio plays, three collections of essays and two collections of personal
sketches. His best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics.[3][4] Manto was
known to write about the hard truths of society that no one dared to talk about. He is best known
for his stories about the partition of India, which he opposed, immediately following
Anton Chekhov
Chekhov wrote from every point of view: men, women, old, young, rich, poor. And he was able
to get under the skin of all these different sorts of people, thus proving that you don’t have to
write about who you are all the time. He had this incredible compassion and humanity for
whoever he was writing about. He remains the best at creating sympathy for unsympathetic
characters. Read The Duel or The Witch, which both feature protagonists you might not approve
of, and by the end your heart is just breaking for them. There weren’t so many rules for short
stories back then. Those have been established more recently. Apparently, every short story
needs an intro, climax, denouement, and especially, as an editor once old me, an epiphany. I
don’t believe in that. Chekhov just took a character and, though something always happens to
that character, they’re not wiser for it necessarily. But the reader is wiser.
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2. Katherine Mansfield
Her stories are very mysterious to me. For example, I’ve read and taught The Daughters of the
Late Colonel hundreds of times and I still can’t figure out how she does what she does. Except
perhaps by her incredibly precise and original use of language. She’ll use an adjective that will
make you understand exactly what kind of pudding she’s talking about, without having to
describe the pudding. She uses words so beautifully, so adeptly. She also writes children so
well, who are notoriously hard to write about. She gets into their heads and makes them entirely
convincing, and makes you remember what it was like to be a child. There’s a scene in Prelude,
another one of my favorites, where a bunch of kids watch a duck get beheaded. At first they’re
very excited, because they don’t quite know what the outcome of this act is going to be. Then
some of them are horrified and some of them less horrified, but by the end of the scene you’re
convinced that you know exactly what it’s like to see this scene from a child’s point of view.
3. Isaac Babel
Babel was a master of compression. He could write stories that were a page and a half long and
you feel like you’ve kind of been kicked in the head by the time you’ve reached the end of them.
He wrote very beautifully about violence, about warfare, about sex. Talk about toxic masculinity!
He was right there observing it among the Cossacks in the Russia-Polish war. At the same time,
he could be incredibly lyrical. If you want to see what can be done in two and a half pages,
Crossing into Poland is one of the most extraordinary stories ever written. It’s a perfect example
of how much you can accomplish in such a brief space.
4. Mavis Gallant
She is just a consummate stylist. Her range is huge, like Chekhov’s, as are her sympathies.
There’s a light voice on the surface that you can very easily slip beneath, and it’s so deep, and
where she’s going is so profound. She’s writing about post-war Europe and France and
Montreal, and she’s writing about class, politics, history, and putting it all into highly
compressed, beautifully written short stories. Her sentences are models of what a sentence
should be like. I think she was a genius.
5. John Cheever
His stories are so cool and detached on the surface that you have to stop yourself to realize that
he’s capturing the whole lives of his protagonists. Goodbye, My Brother is I think one of the
greatest modern short stories. He’s talking about fallen New England aristocrats but he kicks it
up to this biblical level, Kane and Abel, something primal. The narrator projects all his negative
emotions and judgements onto another character, his brother. In a less brave writer’s work, the
brother would show up and be the innocent victim of all this, but actually when the brother finally
shows up and opens his mouth, he’s worse than everyone’s been saying. Cheever makes one
brilliant choice after another in this story. He gives the reader tons of information without
seeming like he’s giving any at all — he buries the expository parts and makes them agents of
character rather than pure exposition. By the end of the first page, you pretty much know what
you need to know about the character and the family he comes from and then it just gets richer
and richer and richer.
6. James Baldwin
James Baldwin’s story Sonny’s Blues is another masterpiece of compression. It is one of the
best stories ever written about what it means to be an artist — what it means to be an artist, in
particular, in a family that doesn’t quite understand what that means, which I think is the
situation for many artists. It’s a story about brothers — the straight brother’s feelings of
disapproval, envy, confusion. All those emotions he has towards his brother are almost resolved
toward the end, but they’re resolved by being witness to a mystery, which is art. When he
watches Sonny playing, he kind-of gets it: what Sonny’s life is about, and why he might be a
junkie, and why he went to jail. But he can’t completely get it because that’s not who he is. It’s
an epiphany that is the opposite of an epiphany.
7. Deborah Eisenberg
Deborah Eisenberg is one of the most wonderful sentence writers. Everything I’ve said about
the other writers could just as well be about her. Beautiful writing, compressed, deep, a range
attuned to the political as well as the emotional. Her stories are as layered as novels.
8. Roberto Bolaño
The stories in Last Evenings on Earth are just great. They’re almost all about the Chilean, Latin
American diaspora, even if all of them don’t state as much. They’re perfect stories for the
moment too, because they’re all about being refugees of one kind or another. Then he adds
fathers and sons, friendships, stories about being a writer, becoming a writer. He just writes so
beautifully. And then he had the good fortune, only after death, of finding extraordinary
translators. It’s great to acquaint students with it because it’s always shocking to me how little
they know about what happened in Central and South America in the 70s and 80s. They read
Bolaño and they instantly get it.
9. Alice Munro
She writes about women in a way that no one did for a very long time. She tells the truth about
women’s lives — class, love, ambition, sex, marriage, kids, all of it. Speaking of compression,
there is something in every Alice Munro story that seems to to go from Precambrian history all
the way to 20th century Canada.
10. Denis Johnson
He was poet before he was a fiction writer, and his work is a great example of how lyrical you
can be in writing without going off the rails in some way. Religion wasn’t a joke to him. He took it
very seriously. Back in the day, that was a very common thing, but now its very uncommon.
When you read Jesus’ Son, it’s as exotic as Bolaño, because the experience of reading
something by someone who’s actually a believer is unusual in a literary space. He was so good
at writing about altered or damaged state of consciousness. He was a revelation.
S
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