By Sreemati Mukherjee
In practically every story, there is a narrative of human greed that has gone awry; of innocence corrupted by the real world; of the inability of the human being, usually all male in this collection of stories, to retain idealism and incorruptibility.
By Shuma Talukdar
Aparna Singh’s collection of short stories, ‘Periodic Tales’, adeptly covers how menstruation is experienced by women from different walks of life, from different sections of society, in different parts of India.
By Chaitali Sengupta
Burn the Library and Other Fictions is an intense exploration of human condition that tug at your heartstrings. The well-structured stories are rich, unusual, and varied in their range. Such range gives this slim volume considerable merit and deserve greater attention.
By Basudhara Roy
Much as one may endorse the idea of the androgynous creative mind, a world as nuanced with women’s thoughts and feelings as Ambai conjures in her stories, would have been challenging for a male translator to mirror with as much felicity and power as Prasad has done.
By Neera Kashyap
The editor Indira Chandrasekhar has brought together some of the finest examples of short fiction, a coming together of a diverse variety of geography, style, range, content, skill and translation that makes this a fascinating collection for the reader.
By Haritha T Chandran
They either fuck or fight and sometimes fuck and fight. There is no in-between.
By Ram Govardhan
Of all the disasters, Sara knew, coming across one’s ex is the most fatal one.
By Karun Menon
Standing tall with him in her left arm and the black umbrella in her right, she took a breath. And they ascended slowly…one step after another.
By Ramlal Agarwal
In her short stories, she steers clear of cultural confrontation. She deals with characters and situations where there is no confrontation, though she points out the cultural differences without a comment. Jhumpa Lahiri’s insights adds to our understanding of globalization.
By Maliha Iqbal
She went out swift as the wind, her lilac saree carelessly rippling behind as she walked ahead.
By Prabhakar Singh
Professor Chap Lucie, from the Hogward University, entered her classroom holding a coffee mug in her right hand at 10:30 AM sharp. Her personalized coffee mug had the title of her most-cited articled printed on it.
By Sharif Atiquzzaman
As he walked to the hotel, Arif thought of the carved map of a divided country on Ator Ali’s cracked, worn-out skin.
By Madhu S Nair
After a few months, Mohan Gopal returned to America as a married man. This time he arrived in a different city.
By Sharif Atiquzzaman
After the polls, you can’t catch hold of their shadow. Now they promise the Earth. They are political fraud.
By Anuradha Mazumder
His head began to swim, his eyes dimmed… suddenly, the train, the people, and the world around him started receding from him as the lonely coach hurtled through the dark entrails of the city at a breakneck speed.
By Kamalini Natesan
What I have is Daddy’s Hat, and Mommy’s Pain. There’s a hole inside me, I think. I think it is what I am, a girl with a hole inside her.
By Ram Govardhan
And Sara feels that matrimony, as an institution, would always smack of male chauvinism as long as there’s no female Pope. Her greatest dream is to tie the knot when the groom is in jumpers, shorts or long johns on the wedding day, officiated by a gay priest, sans the churchly rituals that suck.
By Sabreen Ahmed
As her memories faded in the darkness of her mind, she looked towards her future goal of nourishing her orphanage and finding the traces of Imran in some human space or form. Continued strife with life seemed no longer a chaos.
By Muddasir Ramzan
The grief and regret that they couldn’t be there when Babb and Moji needed them the most would haunt Ammi, Maam Jan, Chota Maam, Pyari, and Choti Masi forever.
By Madhu S. Nair
Damodaran nodded positive but he didn’t mean it. He was in a hurry to escape from the suffocation of blind love.
Cafe Dissensus Everyday 