Tag Archives: creative writing

Short Story: Fifty-Nine Times but One by Aditya Gautam

Posted on by One comment

Now we’re walking on this empty street and you tell me how we’re very much the same, how much our thoughts and choices match.

‘It has been just a month since I met you,’ you say, ‘and already I feel like I’ve known you for years.’

You said that on this same night five years ago and I laughed out loud then. I told you what a cheesy sentimentalist you are.

You looked straight into my eyes and said quietly, ‘You feel like home.’

Maybe that was the moment you sealed our fates together; I put a stamp on that seal when I kissed you in the next moment. Now I just nod and tell you that I feel the same way. I wish you would not say such things tonight. It will make what I am going to do so much more difficult.

This is one of the rare times when I have come back into a reality I have already been to, except for a few details of course; no two realities can ever be exactly the same. In a way, I am happy to be here – this is the reality, or dimension, whatever you may call it, where we first met.

I turn around once to look back at the softly lit café we have come from. You were eating tiramisu and I was sitting with a glass of wine in my hand. I sipped between your pauses and watched you, trying to learn every single line and every single movement of your face. The way you pick the tiniest morsels in every spoon so that it will last longer, the way you keep the cake in your mouth a moment longer than anyone else I know, so that the taste may fade away slower.

I replied without thought, almost mechanically: it is the same conversation we had five years ago, at the same table.

You have long, brown hair in this reality and I am still not used to it. Where I was up until a month ago, you had blue spiky hair and I had nicknamed you Pixie. That was a good month. At least until the last day when we were in your apartment and the curtains caught fire.

My guts clench as I remember the last words you always say to me: ‘Until the next time, my love.’

Why do you always say that? It isn’t as if you know how true it is…

There is only one street lamp on this stretch of the road and the shadows of trees look like cobwebs around our feet. In one of the houses by the roadside somebody is playing an old song by Kishor Kumar.

Mere mehboob qayamat hogi, aaj ruswa teri galiyon mein mohabbat hogi…

My darling, there will be apocalypse today, love will be disgraced in your street…

You pick up the tune and begin to hum. Everything fits together, eventually.

Read more

Anita Desai: My Literary Apprenticeship with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Posted on by Leave a comment

Alipur Road was a wide avenue lined with enormous banyan trees, and my mother and I would go for walks along it – to Maiden’s Hotel, which had a small library, or further on to the Quidsia Gardens. And, across the road, I’d see a young woman pushing a pram with a baby seated in it and a little girl dancing alongside it. She was a married woman clearly, and I a student at the University of Delhi, but glancing across the road at her, I felt an instinctive relation to her. Why?

She was revealed to be a young woman of European descent – German and Polish – who was married to an Indian architect, Cyrus Jhabvala, and lived in rooms in a sprawling bungalow just off Alipur Road. When her mother, a German Jewish woman from London, visited her, Ruth searched for someone she could talk to. I think it might have been Dr Charles Fabri, the Hungarian Indologist who lived in the neighbourhood, who suggested she might meet my German mother, who had also come to India on marrying an Indian, 30 years before, in the 1920s.

A coffee party – a kaffeklatsch – was arranged so the two could indulge in their shared language in this foreign setting. I can’t imagine how or why, but Ruth decided to follow their meeting, after her mother had returned to England, with many others, on a different level – that of daughters. With extraordinary kindness and generosity she would have me over to their house, one filled with books, the books she had brought with her from England where she had been a student at the University of London when she had met Jhab. Perhaps it touched her that I was so excited about being among her books, talking to her about books. After that whenever I came away with an armful of books on loan, with her talk still in my ears, I felt elated, a visitor to another world, the writers’ world I had only imagined and now proved real. I would go home to scribble at my desk with a new, unaccustomed sense of the validity of such an occupation.

One day she placed in my hands a copy of To Whom She Will, her first novel that had been published in faraway England, an unimaginable distance from Alipur Road, Old Delhi. Holding it, I felt I had touched something barely considered possible – that the scribbling one did in one’s hidden corner of the world could be printed, published and read in the world beyond.

Read More

How the visual arts shaped Japan’s modern literature

Posted on by Leave a comment

By the turn of the 20th century, “sketching from life” had become such a popular literary form that the editors of the literary magazine Hototogisu encouraged the submission of prose essays in this liberating new style.

Early on in Natsume Soseki’s 1908 campus novel “Sanshiro” — one of the most important expositions of the inter-connectedness of visual and literary art ever written — a young scientist, Nonomiya, looks up at a long, thin, white cloud floating diagonally in the sky.

“Do you know what that is?” he asks the titular Sanshiro. “That’s all particles of snow. When you look at it down here, it’s not moving in the least. But up there, it’s moving with a velocity greater than that of a hurricane. Have you read Ruskin? … It would be interesting to sketch this sky.”

When people think about the literature of modern Japan, they tend to think that most of its influences have been, well, literary, whether native or foreign in origin. But in fact — as I would like to show in this four-part series tracing the story from the 19th century to the present — revolutions in painting and visual art have played a defining role in the creation of diverse and often unappreciated aspects of modern Japanese literature.

When Japan emerged from two centuries of seclusion to enter the modern world with the Meiji Restoration of 1868, it struggled to reform and standardize its language and create literary works that could realistically depict the world in the manner of the Western novel.

The difficulties were considerable — the Japanese language itself needed new grammar, such as standardized verb tenses, the merging of literary and colloquial forms and even the creation of third-person pronouns. (The modern word for “she” — kanojo — was not in common currency until the Taisho Era (1912-26)).

Yet even as Japan was absorbing the influence of the Western novel, it was also undergoing a revolution in the visual arts.

Read More

Asymptote’s Blockbuster Summer Edition

Posted on by Leave a comment

Asymptote’s Summer issue presents new writing from 27 countries. An exciting journey through stories and poems with master story-tellers and contest winners.

Asymptote’s blockbuster Summer edition features new fiction by master story-teller Finalized_Summer_2017_FB_announcementMercè Rodoreda, interviews with Kafka translator Michael Hofmann and 2017 Prix Net Art winner Bogosi Sekhukhuni, as well as the first love poems by Nobel front-runner Ko Un, who poignantly captures the longing of “the world…in want of the world.”

Asymptote also announces — and showcases — the 2017 Close Approximations contest winners, picked from a total of 343 entries by David Bellos and Sawako Nakayasu.

Find out which six emerging translators walk away with a total of 3,000 USD in prizes by reading the judges’ citations here.

Watch out for the journals’ fabulous content on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr.

Discover new work from 27 countries + contest winners at http://asymptotejournal.com

 

2017 set to be landmark year for Chinese poetry

Posted on by Leave a comment

By Wen Zongduo/Li Wenfang

Many Chinese poets say that this year will be special for them, a view echoed by Wang Guoqin, a poet and critic who said “poetry is the light ahead in the dark tunnel of my life”, after receiving the Creation Award of the Year at the Third Spring Festival Poetry Gala for his book Talking About Poetry From Zhishi Studio.

The gala in Beijing organized over Jan 13-14 by the Qu Yuan Society of China brought together poetry enthusiasts from Beijing, Xi’an, Nanjing, Kaifeng and Shenyang.

Coincidentally, just over 100 years ago, Chinese poetry underwent a drastic change with poetry collections being published in new styles, free in rhythm and lines, com-pared with traditional verses often preset with tones, rhymes and the numbers of characters.

But questions still abound a century later.

At an event in Zhongshan, Guangdong province, on Jan 8 in the presence of guests from the province, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, Qiu Shuhong, whose latest honor is the World Chinese Poetry Award’s gold prize, proposed that 2017 be made the Year of Chinese Poetry to celebrate the birth of “new poems”. Read more

Source: China Daily

Sorry, but you aren’t a writer.

Posted on by Leave a comment

By Prathap Suthan

Arranging words one after the other doesn’t make you a writer. And putting them coherently in lines without making grammatical mistakes isn’t writing either.

Of course you can write. Anyone who went to school can write. And everyone who took an exam can possibly write as well.

In fact, the nice greying man at the post office can write. The elderly lady at the bank can write. The slightly portly doctor at your nearby clinic can write as well.

So can the cop at the local police station who will file your case sheet when you get booked for Whatsapping your boss along with Facetiming your girlfriend’s constipated hamster, all while driving.

Unfortunately, none of the above writers can write. None of them are genuine writers. None of them can write with the kind of ink that makes tears moist.

None of them can take a couple of words and put them in random order and change the way the world thinks about sport. Or war. Or peace. Or influence large tracts of barren land in your brain to think in a very specific way.

They can’t move ice-hearted people to jump into boats to save a thousand dolphins headed to a secret atoll somewhere in the Japanese archipelago to get their heads bludgeoned and guts pickled.

Read more

‘Love + Hate: Stories and Essays’, by Hanif Kureishi

Posted on by Leave a comment

The author celebrates creativity in this collection — but knows that fantasy can be dangerous: FT

Hanif KureishiHanif Kureishi’s first essay in Love + Hate, “Anarchy and the Imagination”, was originally published in 2014 as “What they don’t teach you at creative writing school”, two months before Kureishi appeared at Bath Literature Festival and outraged “talentless” creative writing students by declaring such courses to be a “waste of time”. His role as their teacher was “part-mentor, part-therapist”. More interesting than the provocation and predictable uproar was his contention that a focus on the texture of sentences distracted students from thinking about how to entertain a reader with story and imaginative ideas. Read more

Not so tall tales: David Davidar on ‘A Clutch of Indian Masterpieces’

Posted on by Leave a comment

David Davidar on his fascination with short stories and how he put together A Clutch of Indian Masterpieces: The Hindu

Apart from being a well-known publisher, David Davidar is also a novelist, editor and anthologist. He has been an attentive reader of Indian fiction from the time he was a teenager. His latest anthology, A Clutch of Indian Masterpieces, has 39 short stories from across Indian fiction selected by Davidar. From Khushwant Singh, Munshi Premchand, Chugtai and Vaikom Muhammed Basheer and Ruskin Bond to new voices like Shahnaz Bashir and Kanishk Tharoor, the volume covers a spectrum of Indian fiction. In this interview, Davidar talks about the short story and the making of the anthology. Excerpts:

What makes a short story?

R. K. Narayan, one of the world’s greatest writers, tells an amusing story about creative writing in general and the short story in particular. He writes: Once I was present at a lecture on creative writing. The lecturer began with: “All writing may be divided into two groups—good writing and bad writing. Good books come out of good writing while bad writing produces failures.” When touching on the subject of the short story, the lecturer said: “A short story must be short and have a story.” At this point I left unobtrusively, sympathizing with the man’s predicament.  Read more

Jhumpa Lahiri to teach creative writing at Princeton University

Posted on by Leave a comment

Indian American author Jhumpa Lahiri will join the faculty of Princeton University next month, as a professor of creative writing at the esteemed Ivy League institution.

jhumpa_lahiri-620x412Lahiri was named alongside 16 other individuals as the university’s newest faculty members, of which four, including Lahiri, will become “full professors”; the other 13 were given assistant professor positions at Princeton. As a professor of creative writing, Lahiri will be part of the school’s Lewis Center for the Arts, and will officially begin work on July 1. Read more

Vietnam: UK poet arrives for Literature Days

Posted on by Leave a comment

Aoife Mannix, a recognisable voice on the UK live literature scene, has arrived in Viet Nam for the European Literature Days 2014 that begins May 22.

Mannix held a workshop on creative writing yesterday with Vietnamese writers and readers at the British Council in HCM City, and will speak today at another workshop at the English department of the HCM City Foreign Languages and Information Technology University on how to use literature in English teaching. Read more

« Older Entries