Out of Print 11

A sense of the personal pervades in the stories that feature in Issue 11 of Out of Print that was released ten days or a fortnight ago.

In @ The Shanghai Tea House by Brinda Narayan, we follow the protagonist and her reflections on her marriage in the course of her sightseeing adventures in Shanghai. In Hananah Zaheer’s A Moment of Silence, Mr Dar must, after his wife’s death, confront a deeply shocking choice that she made.

Mohit Parikh’s main character in Recess has discovered his first pubic hair and goes from elation that he has entered the grown up world to uncertainty and loneliness as he imagines, with trepidation, a world he does not belong to. Kaushik Viswanath’s Karma, tells the story of young man who holds himself in rigorous check; do we like this young man, does he like himself, as he struggles with the impositions he has enforced on himself. A boy transplanted from his Delhi environment to the United States soon after the September 11 attack struggles with the world 11/9 by Anubha Yadav.

Neeraj Sebastian’s Bangalore in Flower unfolds through conversations that take place while the characters prepare a meal for themselves. In Suzanne Biever’s The Blue Man, a young woman who believes she has been reincarnated talks to Krishna to try and make sense of her existence. Renu Balakrishnan’s Spiderman, tells the story of a bizarre gang of car thieves whose nemesis is a little boy, seemingly beatific but wild.

The beautiful cover art is by Archana Hande is from a sequence of the story board for an animation film, All is Fair in Magic White. For more on the art, check the Editor’s Note.

The Links page now has connections to the Out of Print database of literarymagazines with a South Asian connection that feature short fiction, as well as to a press and publicity list

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