Editorial
February is a month of many emotions and memories for Shuddhashar FreeVoice. Each year throughout the month of February in Bangladesh, book fairs are held to commemorate those who gave their lives for their mother language. (In their honor, February 21 has become the United Nations International Mother Language Day.) The Ekushey (meaning “21”) book fair, held in Dhaka, brings people together from all over the region and abroad, uniting them in the spirit of progress, cultural harmony, and humanitarianism. As far as we’re aware, there is no other example of a month-long book fair anywhere else in the world. Shuddhashar regularly participated in the Ekushey book fair as well as others from 2004 to 2015 and recorded the highest number of quality books published in consecutive years. Each February, Shuddhashar engaged in lively interactions with writers and avid readers at the book fair. During those times, we were immersed in the joy of discovering new writings and new thoughts, sharing in the excitement surrounding this important national event. Alongside this nostalgia, there is also profound sadness. 2013 began a fierce wave of threats to secular and outspoken writers and publishers who were targeted by radical Islamists. The atheist Bangladeshi American writer Abhijit Roy and Bangladeshi writer Ananta Bijay Das, whose books were published by Shuddhashar, were brutally killed. Abhijit Roy was killed in the month of February, on February 26, 2015, just after leaving Shuddhashar’s book launch at the Ekushey book fair. For publishing a significant number of books on religion and social criticism, the publishing house Shuddhashar also became a target, and on October 31, 2015, Shuddhashar’s office was attacked, leaving the publisher seriously injured.
All in all, February is a month of tumultuous reflection and emotion for Shuddhashar. The emotions inevitably come, unrestrained, but instead of dwelling on memories from another time, we try to keep our eyes focused on our dreams and commitments. For each February, Shuddhashar plans to publish a creative issue. This is our new journey of Shuddhashar. This is our commemoration of Ekushey and the annual book fair.
For this February, our creative issue is Short Story. Short fiction is a modern form of literature. With its brevity, it offers a glimpse and an experience — like feeling the waves of an ocean in a small pond. Because of its succinctness and careful attention to minutia, many people consider short stories to be an artistic medium almost parallel to poetry. The poetry lines of Rabindranath Tagore, a renown Bengali writer and Nobel laureate, offers a description that applies very well to the experience of reading excellent short stories: “There will be dissatisfaction in the heart, it will seem like the end is not the end.” The best short stories leave the reader with unanswerable questions and a feeling of dissatisfaction.
We welcome you to Issue 32 on Short Story where you will find a rich variety of stories. We strived for linguistic and national diversity when we planned this issue, but due to various limitations, it was not possible to reach the goals we set for ourselves. We were also unable to connect with many of the storytellers who are widely known for their powerful stories.
However, the stories we have published are extraordinary in terms of subject matter and style of narrative variety. In this collection, we see diverse environments and characters as well as different types of happiness, sadness, and struggles. Several of the stories are originals and published here for the first time. We have also published some wonderful translations of stories from other languages as well as some analytical essays about short stories.
To accompany the stories, we posed questions to the storytellers and translators. While not everyone was able to provide as in-depth responses as we had hoped, we suspect that recent challenges such as the pandemic, war, skyrocketing prices, and signs of an economic depression have squeezed people’s lives in many ways. People are busy, distracted, and restless. The responses given by some of the storytellers seem to reflect that. Other responses are insightful and really interesting for thinking about what inspires writers in their craft.
Our motivation for these interview questions was to ponder the contemporary role of literature. Today – as we are repeatedly reminded in news reports – nearly all the world’s information is available, but people’s attention span has decreased, resulting in significant changes in reading patterns. More changes are coming as AI becomes increasingly used as a tool for writing, including writing short stories and poetry. Our contributors don’t address these new challenges, but they share their interest in literature and their personal writing or translating experiences and goals. In an age when less people dive into the literary world, we believe it is especially important to hear writers and translators describe their enduring love of stories. Stories are not merely a form of entertainment. They have lessons for all of us about the human condition, and many of these lessons are timeless. We are convinced that there is nothing – certainly no technological invention – that can replace the human struggle to express life through stories.
Shuddhashar is absolutely delighted that internationally renowned story writer and translator Shabnam Nadiya has curated and edited this short story issue as a guest editor.
We hope Issue 32 will please readers who love to read stories and that it can serve as a resource for researchers of literature.
“Well, they’re…short,” said my friend. I had asked a couple of non-writer friends how they would define the short story. I’d asked non-writers because I didn’t want academic or theoretical bahaas, debate or discussion, to muddy my question; I wanted to know what readers thought about them. I understood the slight uncertainty my friend—an avid …
Punjab: The Land of Five Rivers There’s no point in churning water. It will never become butter. Punjabi saying “Do you see what they’re doing, Sir-ji? Do you see?” Mohammed Sharif’s voice rose at the end. Atif nodded: anyone could see what they were doing. They had made no attempt to hide it. There were …
Omar Khalifah is a Palestinian-Jordanian writer and academic. A Fulbright scholar, he received his MA and PhD from Columbia University and is now associate professor of Arabic literature and culture at Georgetown School of Foreign Service in Qatar. Khalifah’s interests also include Palestine studies, memory, literature, cinema, and nationalism in the Arab world. In addition to …
Writer and poet Anita Agnihotri was born in Kolkata, India, in 1956 and received degrees in economics from Presidency College and Calcutta University. Although she began writing at an early age, she also had a long career as a bureaucrat until her retirement from the civil services as Secretary in Ministry of Social Justice and …
Amiya Sen was born in undivided India’s Barisal district in 1924. Her first novel, Jey Shaakhey Photey na Phool was first serialized in Desh magazine and later published as a book with the title Surhara Banshi. Amiya Sen’s short stories, poems, and articles have been published in various magazines, including Desh, Nabakallol, Purbabasha, Prabartak, Angana, …
SM Ashraf was born in Uttar Pradesh, India in 1957. He grew up with easy access to literature in Urdu, Persian, Sanskrit, and Arabic and influenced by Sufi ideals of love and community and a concern for the economically disandvantaged. He has become an an award-winning Urdu novelist and short story writer. His novels have …
The Golden Years Line of light from the window, framed by the curtains and the rod. One foot of water-damaged ceiling, then vent. Another foot, then fan. Blade one. Blade two. Blade three. Blade four, out of whack. Out of alignment, all wobbly. Five more feet, doorway. Door, painted badly. Smurf stickers near the knob. …
Neerav Patel (1950-2019) was one of the most well-known Dalit writers of Gujarat, India. Perhaps the only bi-lingual Dalit writer in Gujarat, he wrote in Gujarati and English and has published three collections of poetry. His most notable publications include Burning from Both the Ends (1980), What Did I Do To Be Black and Blue …
Born in South Korea in 1987, Guka Han studied fine arts in Seoul before moving to Paris in 2014. Her debut collection, Le Jour où le désert est entré dans la ville, has been translated into Japanese and Korean. A graduate of the Master de Création Littéraire at Université Paris 8, she is also a translator into Korean …
Kim Namil is a South Korean novelist and activist. He was born in Suwon, South Korea in 1957, studied Dutch at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, and was imprisoned for pro-democracy activities during the 1970s military regime. Kim made his literary debut in 1983. His writings reflect social criticism, which in the 1980s centered on labor issues …
Shubhankar Kulkarni, Ph.D. is an independent researcher in the fields of biology and medicine. Academic writing occupies a significant part of his day-to-day job, and alongside this, he writes short stories in Marathi. His experience in the life sciences helps him combine his two interests by writing science fiction. His fiction-writing journey started with this story, …
