Kitaab Quarterly-Editor's Note (Vol. 1)

Guest editor Rajat Chadhuri shares the editor’s note for Kitaab Quarterly Vol-1

The uncanny is no stranger to fiction. Strangeness, the unfamiliar-familiar, creepy characters, and settings have been around from the time our earliest storytellers mesmerized audiences with their wondrous dastaans. Recently, however, there has been increased attention on the uncanny or the unheimlich in plot and setting because literature engaged with climate change.

As the climate crisis gets bigger and climate fiction draws more and more readers, we thought it might be a good idea to explore the uncanny in all its creative breadth through this inaugural issue of Kitaab Quarterly. While keeping our focus on the climate uncanny, we also wanted to present other forms and manifestations of strangeness that our writers and poets can imagine.

This issue is our first attempt to capture `the uncanny’ through fiction and poetry by Asian writers. We received an enthusiastic response to our call for submissions and choosing the best was no easy task. The final table of contents reflects our interpretation of the theme as much as it does the creativity and ingenuity of our contributors.

Rimi B. Chatterjee’s apocalyptic tale set in and around New Singapore builds tension with small doses of weirdness till something completely unimaginable happens. Priya Sarukkai Chabria uses bricolage and an innovative form to present a satire-laced account of a mythical land of plenty and how it parallels high-consumption lifestyles and the blind belief in ecomodernist fixes of the present. Gently weaving in the improbable, Chabria’s story right at the end reminds us of the `agency of place’ in `climate uncanny’. It is as if the planet has itself spoken through its actions.

Among other stories, Sneha Pathak’s `Curse’ and Shikhandin’s `Jeet’ will send shivers down your spine. Both tales brilliantly engage more familiar brands of the uncanny, if familiarity can be considered an apt category to speak about the unfamiliar. Each of the stories included here has uniquely approached the theme which we hope will make this volume a reader’s delight.

Unlike in fiction, poetry’s connection with the improbable, and by virtue of it with the uncanny, had never experienced any extended period of suppression or neglect. We are delighted to have a number of poets writing about the uncanny in this issue. The poems by Gopal Lahiri, Dilantha Gunawardana, Jonathan Chan, and others meld poignant imagery with dark resonant diction to evoke strangeness and the unthinkable at the human and planetary scales. We have also included a couple of reviews of books that delve into the theme while closing with Roy Tristan Agustin’s thoughtful essay exploring how the uncanny can sometimes intersect with reality.

I hope this issue will spook, scare and entertain in equal measure while leaving us a little more conscious about the many voices through which the planet and other beings speak.

Happy reading!

Rajat Chaudhuri

Calcutta (June, 2024)

About Rajat Chaudhuri

Rajat Chaudhuri is a bilingual author writing in English and Bengali. His works include novels, short story collections, edited anthologies and translated volumes of poetry and prose. His recent cli-fi novel The Butterfly Effect has been twice listed by the Book Riot community, USA as a ‘Fifty must read eco-disasters in fiction’ and in ‘Ten works of environmental literature from around the world’. He edited The Best Asian Speculative Fiction and co-edited Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures, a collection of solarpunk stories from Asia-Pacific.

Chaudhuri is a recipient of a Charles Wallace Creative Writing Fellowship (UK), Hawthornden Castle fellowship (Scotland, UK), Sangam House and Arts Council Korea-InKO residency among other honours and his fiction has been featured in the climate change education video game Survive the Century. Chaudhuri has spoken about climate change fiction (cli-fi) and speculative storytelling in a variety of national and international venues including University of Oxford, Sahitya Akademi, Museum of Science Fiction (Washington D.C.) and his books are taught in Indian and American universities. His new novel Spellcasters was published by Niyogi Books (November 2023).

Website: http://www.rajatchaudhuri.net Twitter: @rajatchaudhuri