The Greatest Urdu Stories Ever Told
The Greatest Urdu Stories Ever Told
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Selected and translated by writer, editor and translator par
excellence Muhammad Umar Memon, the twenty-five stories in this book represent
the finest short fiction in Urdu literature.
In his Introduction, Memon traces the evolution of the Urdu
short story from its origins in the work of writers like Munshi Premchand-‘the
first professional short story writer in Urdu’-through the emergence of the
Progressives in the late 1930s, whose writings were unabashedly political and
underpinned their Marxist ideologies, to the post-Independence ‘Modernist’ era,
and today’s generation of avant-garde, experimental writers of Urdu fiction.
Every story in the anthology illustrates one or the other
facet of the form in the Urdu literary tradition. But even more than for their
formal technique and inventiveness, these stories have been included because of
their power and impact on the reader. Death and poverty face off in Premchand’s
masterpiece ‘The Shroud’. In Khalida Asghar’s ‘The Wagon’, a mysterious redness
begins to cloak the sunset in a village by the Ravi. Behind closed doors and
cracks in the windows lies desire but also ‘a sense of queer foreboding’ in
Naiyer Masud’s ‘Obscure Domains of Fear and Desire’. The tragedy and horror of
Partition are brought to life by Saadat Hasan Manto’s lunatic (in ‘Toba Tek
Singh’) and the eponymous heroine of Rajinder Singh Bedi’s ‘Laajwanti’.
Despairing, violent, passionate, humorous, ironic and profound-the fiction in
The Greatest Urdu Stories Ever Told will imprint itself indelibly on your mind.