Hero and Other Stories reviewed by Lopa Basu for India Currents (Nov. 30th, 2022).
Read full article at website. Excerpt appears below:
This collection of stories is an important addition to the archive of South Asian literature expanding not only the scope of Pakistani literature beyond its offerings in Urdu and English but also serving to expand the archive of Partition memories. Most significantly, the characters in Nadir Ali’s stories often have rural roots and belong to the lower socio-economic rungs of society. Stylistically, these stories are taut and compressed, relying on an aesthetic of minimalism rather than ornateness and striving for maximum impact while practicing a remarkable restraint in language.
Anu Kumar’s A Sense of Time and Other Stories was reviewed by Nick Hilbourn for Prairie Schooner (Vol. 95, No. 3, Fall 2021)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/860599/summary
A Sense of Time and Other Stories was also reviewed by Lopa Basu for India Currents (June 3rd, 2021).
Read the full article at the website. Excerpt is included here:
“The precarity of intimate relationships is a continuing thread in this collection and Kumar explores the implications of marital disharmony in rural subaltern as well as urban elite contexts. In ‘Rekha Crosses a Line’, a wife facing a crisis of identity falls victim to the charms of a godman while being aware of his manipulations.
Marital disharmony leads Malati in ‘Dorothy Cries in the Bus’ to leave her husband, Ashok, and board a bus for another town. It is on the bus she develops a sudden friendship with a Canadian female tourist, Dorothy, who is also experiencing her own romantic travails.
While the oppressions and solidarities between women form a connecting thread between stories, some stories are more directly a critique of the current state of Indian nationalism, the erosion of the founding promises and ideals of Gandhi and other leaders.”
A review of Syed Afzal Haider’s Life of Ganesh was written by Moazzam Sheikh for The News on Sunday (June, 2019)
The complete review can be accessed at the website and an excerpt appears below:
https://www.thenews.com.pk/tns/detail/567866-sorrows-love
. . . Haider’s fiction, short stories included, seems inspired by real life nightmares. However, the beauty of his fiction is the manner in which it is written — which is the exact opposite of what nightmarish prose would look like. Although Ramzan is referred to as Ram throughout To Be With Her and he alludes to Sabina as his Sita once or twice; in Life of Ganesh Ram has metamorphosed into Ved and is from India; his only connection to Pakistan remains his childhood friends most of whom were Muslims and opted for Pakistan for safety. Just as Ram never recovers from the loss of his childhood spent in India before migrating to Karachi, Ved constantly laments for his friends who vanished within a blink of an eye. . .
A review of Moazzam Sheikh’s Cafe Le Whore and Other Stories written by Saeed Ur Rehman appeared in The News on Sunday in March 2014.
The entire review can be read at the website and an excerpt appears below:
https://www.thenews.com.pk/tns/detail/555966-cafe-le-whore-moazzam-sheikh
…Sagheer Malal once described Borges as “a writer who produced literature for other writers.” This also seems to be the case with Moazzam Sheikh’s book Café Le Whore and Other Stories. The second collection of short stories by Sheikh is a book that breaks almost all the conventions of narration without properly falling into the readily available category of “magical realism.” A potpourri of irreverent, logic-defying, quirky and melancholic short stories, the book should have been available more widely all over the world even if just as a counter-argument to what is being celebrated as mainstream Pakistani literary fiction in English . . .
Weavers Press 