Böcker i Ratna Translation-serien

Aaram Viral, a novel [Malayatoor] published three years before his death in 1997, has now found a good English translation. The Sixth Finger, portraying 1970s-80s south India, reads all the more relevant today, when the country has its burgeoning babas effectively competing with Hindu gods in number.

Avadhoot Dongare is a young promising Marathi novelist. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar, 2014, for Svatahala Faltu Samjanyachi Goshta (The Story of Being Useless). He has a phenomenally different way of telling a story. Once he starts telling the story, he moves out of the picture. The characters start behaving independently.

Joshi's fiction is animated by his extraordinary sensitivity to the uncanny and inexplicable dimensions of experience that underlie and sometimes infiltrate our lives governed by routines. He has an admirable gift for portraying normality as it begins to slide by degrees towards chaos, without raising the emotional temperature of his prose.

Recalling the productive yet rhetorical overreach of protests that women's groups have organized over the decades against violent acts directed at women, Githanjali's brisk prose veers between the melodramatic and the sentimental. Yet the psychological truth that violent acts convey in all their inchoateness is never obscured.

Hiremath's works describe the lives of different communities of Bagalkote, their struggles, different skills they have, vocations they pursue and their language and customs. Neither the localized environment nor the language seems to have imposed any restrictions on Hiremath's narratives. They become functional and cease to be ornamental.

R. Chudamani's style of writing is not loud and proclamatory. Her stories are about sensitive people, especially women, struggling in unspoken ways or with minimal ways of revealing their inner selves, to retain their sensitivity in today's world of gender violence, caste discrimination and elite arrogance.

In this anthology of short stories, delicately crafted, poignant, often charmingly funny, Appadurai Muttulingam summons from the sweep of global forces the intimate realities of human relationships. The author's voice is that of a true storyteller in the classic sense: insightful, tragic and yet funny - and quite hilarious at times.

Tender, sharp and bold, these stories light up the dark corners of the human mind. Though placed in a definite milieu, these are stories any reader can identify with. The translator has provided an elegant bridge over which she takes the reader from the original Marathi to English.-SHASHI DESHPAND

Sethu is easily one of the best contemporary story-tellers in Malayalam. At a time when stories have begun to vanish from narratives growing abstract or turning into superficial experiments with local idiom, Sethu continues to engage the readers with tales that often seem like fables, stories that you can hardly put down.- K. SATCHIDANANDAN

M. Mukundan has been called the 'Writer of Mayyazhi' and some of his best-known works have as their background, Mayyazhi, that small area in Kerala which is still French at heart. And yet he spent a large part of his life in Delhi and a number of his powerful works are set in that place and speak of its people. Haridwaril Manikal Muzhangunnu came out in 1972 to loud acclaim and louder criticism. It spoke to the alienated youth of the late 1960s and early 1970s; and the criticism was because it seemed to glorify the use of drugs and a way of life that was considered immoral then. With Ramesh and Suja, we travel to ancient Haridwar where the Ganga came to earth, where the marks made by Bhageeratha's chariot wheels can still be seen and Bhima's sweat can still be tasted in the water of the pond dug by him. Ramesh finds himself unable to resist the call of the bells of Haridwar.The other two novellas take us back to Mayyazhi, the small piece of land where time has stood still for decades. Both the stories speak of the man of rectitude face to face with his baser instincts, his natural instincts. Meetheledath Ravunni is led astray by the sight of the girdle that encircles Savitri's slim waist and descends to an animal-like existence. As for Kunhikrishnan Thampuran, the honeyed skin of the oil-miller's wife reduces him finally to an innocence that is child-like, unselfconscious.

Gangadhar Gadgil represents the "New Short Story" era by being a pioneer in bringing about fresh literary awareness into Marathi literature of the time. His style is deceptively simple, which at times turns satirical . . . Keerti moves fluently in both languages with a creative mind; she can hear the inner voice of a writer.

These stories are intricately woven with threads of imagination and interpretation, which allow us to live that particular life in that particular moment in the given landscape that is extremely strange and intensely familiar at the same time. An accomplished storyteller masterly transforms his regional experience into universal aesthetics.

The river, the sand, the rains and the floods blend with the characters in the novel, even as Madhavan subtly hints at the need for caution when exploiting the bounties of nature. Like the gentle flow of a river, the novel portrays the contradictions humans negotiate with nature as they uphold aesthetic values of what is beautiful and what is not.

Sathyavathi's stories are powerful, deeply sensitive and widely varied in their themes, most of her writings concern women - their lives and living, dreams and disappointments, losses and achievements. She is a keen observer and shares her anguish about today's human life and living with us through her stories in urban and rural settings.