Stories we read in 2021 in our short story reading club

In 2021, we read 82 stories, 8 translations. Stories from India, Mauritius, Australia, China, Israel, Mexico, New Zealand, France, UK, US, Central America, Ireland, Japan, Sri Lanka, Uganda, Chile, Taiwan, Tasmania, Russia, Germany, Hong Kong, Singapore, Canada.

Stories we read in 2020 in our short story reading club

The reading club was launched in March 2020, as we went into Covid-19 lockdown. This year we read 59 stories, many written originally in English but also translations from many languages, including Chinese, Arabic, Bengali, Malayalam, French, Polish, Spanish, Korean, and Japanese.

Stories we read in 2022 in our short story reading club

In 2022, we read 73 stories, 62 writers, 9 in translation. Writers from India, Pakistan, Nigeria, U.S., U.K, Ukraine, China, Germany, Russia, Ecuador, Ireland, Egypt, Japan, Australia, Kenya. Stories included: reworked folk tales, science/speculative fiction, noir, literary fiction.


Our online short story reading club completes third year

When Covid-19 isolated us at home in March 2020, some of us worried about how to continue community. I thrive on connection. On Facebook I read that a friend in Delhi was starting an online book club. The time didn’t work for us here in the Bay Area, so I thought we’d start our own. A post on Facebook showed that a number of people interested, most local but when we got going we’ve had members living in D.C. and Thailand.

Our ambition to discuss books, novellas mainly, didn’t pan out. Too short a time to read a book a week. And we wanted to keep a weekly schedule. We went over to short stories, and sometimes, novel excerpts. We rotate choices among our attendees – there’s a range of taste there – and we’ve read mystery and noir, science/speculative fiction, re-imagined folk and fairy tales, and lots of ‘literary fiction.’ We prefer texts available online and sometimes people share scanned stories. We’re grateful to all the magazines and sites out there that generously publish short fiction.

Our stories have spanned the globe and have included many translations from languages around the world.

Some of us are writers and have many writer friends; we’ve read some stories from our friends and people we’ve known. We’ve kept away from reading stories any of us have penned.

Our members have enjoyed most of the stories, though not every single one. Our discussions have always been energetic and often set off additional explorations into authors, other writing by them, different topics and subjects. It is so enriching to see such a range of writing and the brilliance of so many writers.

In 2022, we’ve read 73 stories, 62 writers, 9 in translation. Writers from India, Pakistan, Nigeria, U.S., U.K, Ukraine, China, Germany, Russia, Ecuador, Ireland, Egypt, Japan, Australia, Kenya.

In 2021, 81 stories, including many translations, including from Chinese, Japanese, Marathi, Russian, Spanish, French, German, Hebrew.

In 2020, we read 58 stories.

In separate posts, I will share lists of all the stories we’ve read each year.

Why we need a new, truly global, prize for world literature

This article was published in The Dhaka Tribune and reprinted by Scroll India

Another October, another Nobel for Literature, another round of controversy over the awardee.

Some years, we hardly know the person, so we scramble to find out something about them, looking for bits of their writing online. Other years, like 2016, it goes to a more prominent person. Some are elated, others find the choice intriguing, while still others express disappointment that it didn’t go to someone else they consider more deserving.

But it is only one prize given to a single person, and truth be told, every year there are dozens of valid contenders from around the world.

I believe that the weakest critique of the Nobel is the one that criticises it for not recognising someone outside the European mainstream. From there, a question naturally arises: Why do we – whether supporting the Nobel choice or opposing it – behave as if the Nobel Committee is the anointed arbiter of world literature? Why do we act as if it’s the Politburo of the World Republic of Letters?

In reality, the Swedish Nobel Committee is merely a handful of jurors from a small country of less than 10 million, speaking a language that is one of the smaller ones in the world. The current committee has five full members and two associates.

They are all writers, some of them also professors, but I don’t know a thing about them or their writing. They are probably all white, and, for sure, all European and Swedish. It looks like three of the seven are women.

Nominations come from writers and academics around the world, and the committee probably has staff that helps them select and read nominees.

But, at the end of the day, given who they are, given where they are based, they will no doubt have a certain predilection for European/European-origin writers, and, over the long haul, will privilege European languages. Sometimes, they break the pattern of what’s expected of them, and those are always the interesting choices.

I understand that the Nobel Committee set up the Literature Prize to be the first global literary prize. That was certainly gutsy of them. It helped that this was virgin territory, and perhaps because there were no other contenders, the Nobel Literature Prize would become known as the world’s premier award for literary work. Of course, it helped that the prize was based in a small, more or less neutral, European country, outside of the big-power divisions of world politics.

But did people immediately accept it as the premier award for letters? Or was it seen as an interesting new fad, with people reserving judgment until it curated a list of awardees?

I doubt people all rose to applaud when the first prize was announced in 1901 for the French poet René François Armand (Sully) Prudhomme.

Yes, who?

Though it broke new ground here and there – awarding the prize to Rabindranath Tagore in 1913, for example – and to some truly deserving writers, for most of its first half-century, the Nobel Prize was known more for its misses rather than for its hits. It was more notable for who it left out.

What did it mean when it awarded Boris Pasternak, who’d been published outside Soviet censorship? Or then about Pablo Neruda, who’d sympathised with Soviet communism?

It is probably after the Cold War sparks dimmed, and the Nobel broke ground reaching out to writers outside the mainstream, that many of us came to expect it as the arbiter of people of letters even as only a small number were recognised. That’s vital to remember: Even in the Western tradition, more significant writers have been left out by the Nobel than recognised. And if we are to mention under-represented literatures, the Swedes must be among the unhappiest lot: their Academy has only rewarded seven over the life of the prize.

Still, despite outliers – two Japanese, two Chinese, a few from Africa and the Caribbean – the Nobel mainly privileges Western European writers and languages. When it reaches beyond, those of us from the world beyond Europe and North America applaud. But when it doesn’t, we are unhappy.

How long has it been since the decolonisation of most of the colonised world?

How long has it been that Japan has emerged as a major economic power from its WWII defeat? Or a number of Asian countries to emerge as developed economies? Or some African nations to rise as powerful countries?

Why is it that no one outside the West, no one in the South or East, has come up with a literary prize that might be more open to recognising talent from other corners of the planet?

Look at the alternatives to the Nobel. There are few. The Neustadt Prize is really the only other international award, and that’s run out of the University of Oklahoma.

Both its jurors and its nominees are often quite interesting, but we don’t line up like clockwork every two years to await the Neustadt Prize like we do the Nobel.

There are a few other prizes – the Man Booker International Prize, the International Dublin – but those tend to privilege the English language or translations into English.

There are some prizes specific to other languages, such as French or Spanish, and there are also some regional prizes. In Asia, until 2008, there used to be a Magsaysay Prize in the Philippines for “journalism, literature, and creative communication arts.”

There are plenty of billionaires and millionaires from the South and East today. No doubt a few among them might even be partial to literature. Maybe. But why is it that no one has come forward to fund another international award that might be smarter than the Nobel?

In the end, I think we are all complicit in handing over the role of “world arbiter of literature” to the Nobel Committee. Let’s admit it – deep down, we all look towards Europe’s approval to decide what’s best in the world republic of letters. Our disappointment in the Nobel is a marker of our own insecurities, our lack of confidence.

No doubt this will change one day. Perhaps someone in a country of the South and East, not tied up in international power politics, someone with passion and integrity, will bring forth a more inclusive international prize. Not just a copy of the Nobel, but a smarter prize. Until that day, we will perk up our ears every October and either celebrate or gnash our teeth at the latest decision from Stockholm. And after a new prize arrives, we will switch our glee or ire to that new prize.

In Bangladesh, writing fiction about the liberation war may well become impossible

Bangladesh is about to pass a law making it illegal to ‘misrepresent’ the liberation war of 1971. Will all writers have to tell the same story now? My take on the subject, published in the Dhaka Tribune and reprinted at Scroll.in, June 22, 2016.

All signs suggest that the Parliament will soon pass the Liberation War Denial Crimes Act.

This law will give anyone the right to file a complaint with the police or the courts. While history is defined as settled, the law’s clauses about history are vague, and it goes on to consider it a crime to be “representing the liberation war history inaccurately or with half-truth in the text books or in any other medium”.

Other writers have expressed anxiety about what this means for the freedom to research the complex and polyphonic history of the entire movement for independence. I share those concerns but as a writer of fiction, I also fear for the burden this will impose on creative writers.

The Aerogram Book Club discussion on Uday Prakash’s The Girl with the Golden Parasol

girl.with_.the_.golden.parasolI was asked recently by The Aerogram Book Club to organize a discussion on a translation of a book from South Asia. I proposed Uday Prakash’s The Girl With the Golden Parasol, originally published in Hindi. The book was translated by Jason Grunebaum.

Here’s the conversation between me, Daisy Rockwell, and Kevin Hyde:

 

Aerogram Book Club on The Girl With the Golden Parasol

 

On the Dearth of South Asian translations in the U.S.

 

Part of my library of translations published in India

August 2014: I’ve published a series of columns at the Asymptote Blog on the near invisibility of South Asian translations in the U.S. From the first post:

A small percentage of literary books published in the U.S. are translations. The translation program at the University of Rochester maintains yearly databases of translated titles available in the U.S. South Asian languages barely make these lists: in the last five years, out of 2121 books, only 19 were from South Asian languages (only Urdu, Hindi, Bangla, Tamil). No surprise that European languages dominate, but given the vibrant literature from South Asia and a somewhat growing interest in translated literature, it’s a serious problem when so few titles and literature from so few languages find their way to American readers.

Yet within South Asia, especially in India, there has been a small explosion of translations into English. The quality has improved. In Bangladesh and Pakistan, however, most translations are still poor. From the Indian scene, a few titles have been republished in the U.S. In a future article in this series, I will explore the translation scene in the subcontinent and look at how works from there travel here. For this and the next several posts, I focus on conversations with translators, critics, and publishers based in the U.S.

 

Here are all the posts:

Letter from America: FICTION FACTORIES

This was published in the Arts & Letters supplement of the Dhaka Tribune, a new English daily in Bangladesh, on November 3, 2013. You can read the Arts & Letters Supplements here.
hardy-drew
I took a journey back in time.

At the local library, I wandered to the children’s section and spotted a neatly stacked row of hardcovers with familiar blue spines: The Hardy Boys. I was transported back to the library on the second story of the old St Joseph High School building in Narinda, Dhaka. I was again eleven, beginning to devour the juvenile books the Brothers had stocked there.

That year the school moved to its current Mohammadpur location, and I continued my frenzied reading of the adventures of the Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, and Tom Corbett. My classmates and I soon consumed the entire stock. Then we came to grips with puberty and moved on from the chaste world of these boys to sexier material: James Bond and our own Bangladeshi superspy, Masud Rana.

I decided to loiter in my childhood by borrowing two Hardy Boys novels. I added a Nancy Drew, familiar to my young self through my sister who studied at Holy Cross. What would it feel like to read these books again, so many decades later?

Letter from America: LIBRARY LOVE

This was published in the Arts & Letters supplement of the Dhaka Tribune, a new English daily in Bangladesh, on September 1, 2013. You can read the Arts & Letters Supplements here.
library
I work at a college. One morning talking books with a friend, I realize that although I read a lot of crime fiction – set everywhere from Laos to Iceland – I have yet to read Dashiell Hammett, the master of American noir. At lunch, I stop by the library and pick up Hammett’s Complete Novels. Within a week I devour three, including The Maltese Falcon. When the next reading whim arrives, satisfying it might be just as simple.

I appreciate my access to libraries. It’s easy to take for granted. Life reminds otherwise.