Celestial Bodies, winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2019 is a spiralling novel<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n <\/p>\n
5.Tokyo Ueno Station by Miri Y\u016b, translated by Morgan Giles<\/h3>\n Tokyo Ueno Station<\/em> is a short book but deserves your undivided time and attention. It follows a ghost of a homeless man, Kazu, and through him we look at the history of Japan from the 1930s to the destruction caused by the tsunami in 2011 and the outrage against the 2020 Olympic bid. There are snippets of conversations, buried memories and many events, big and small, that shaped Japan (the Emperor, tsunami, Olympics, park clean ups, homeless taking shelter in theatres\/public baths\/libraries, plight of the downtrodden society who are seen as an eye sore during events like the Olympics).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Short Stories<\/strong><\/h2>\nHere are some excellent short story collections to bite into if you are short of long, leisurely hours to indulge in a novel.<\/p>\n
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6.Mouthful of Birds by Samantha Schweblin, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell<\/h3>\n Mouthful of Birds<\/em> has to be one of my favourite short story collections this year \u2014 weird, strange and hypnotic. A woman wonders why her husband drove off when she got out of the vehicle until she discovers other abandoned women. A baby is spat out. A parent kills a butterfly but is alarmed at the action. A girl eats live birds as she alternates staying with her divorced parents. Sure, as typical of short story collections, there are a few stories that are unsatisfying but stay for the impeccable first paragraphs and gorgeous prose.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
7.Arid Dreams by Duanwad Pimwana, translated from the Thai by Mui Poopoksakul<\/h3>\n Fresh, original stories are such a joy, and Arid Dreams<\/em>, translated from the Thai has 13 stories. A man who is about to be executed asks his prison mate to pass on a story to a hooker, a man is surprised that the woman he takes a fancy to will sleep with only foreign tourists and not Thai men, another man is exasperated that his woman had an affair with his best friend, a woman imagines her husband succumbing to his fatal accident and wonders if she\u2019ll re-discuss the colour of the wallpaper with him, a childless woman carves wooden dolls, a man is obsessed with his wife’s fading beauty and tattooed eyebrows.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
I enjoyed the slowness of stories, the way they bring alive the local surroundings and the troubles bubbling in the character\u2019s lives even though these stories are mostly about men and those about women are laced through the men\u2019s gaze.<\/p>\n
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8.Book of Tehran edited by Fereshteh Ahmadi<\/h3>\n Slightly cheating here because this anthology has ten stories by men and women, in an almost equal measure, though in my defense the women translators outbid the male counterparts (only two). A girl writes a letter to her aunt who had convinced her that her mother was an unpleasant woman, four college students discuss marriage, an artist longs to create from grief, and a young woman chats with her neighbour\u2019s wife. Since each story is by a different writer, it becomes impossible to generalize the book into a particular writing style but a handful of stories revolve around aspirations, closed spaces and relationships between women.<\/p>\n
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It is good to note that Comma Press has a whole ongoing series of short story collections set in different cities. I have my eyes on the Cairo book next.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\nSpooky stories translated from the Indonesian in Apple and Knife by Intan Paramaditha<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n <\/p>\n
9.Apple and Knife by Intan Paramaditha, translated from the Indonesian by Stephen J Epstein<\/h3>\n This was released in English in late 2018 by Harvill Secker (and earlier by Brow Books) but I feel it deserves a mention in the 2019 lists because it has been so under represented last year. This book is an intoxicating read, set in everyday Indonesia with bizarreness creeping in at unexpected moments. Think suicidal porcelain dolls, bottled screams, sex and taboos. Cinderella\u2019s step sisters, with self mutilated feet and pecked blind by a crow, tell another version of the happily-ever-after fairytale, a \u2018devil woman\u2019 pays a man to act out her sexual fantasies and a town beauty spends her evenings with a deformed gravedigger \u2014 disfigurement and body degradation is a theme in many stories. Pick this up for horror stories, dark and sinister.<\/p>\n
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10.Toddler Hunting and other stories by Taeko K\u014dno, translated from the Japanese by Lucy North and Lucy Lower<\/h3>\n Taeko K\u014dno is an under represented author in the English world though she has won major literary awards in Japan. The stories in this collection are disquieting, softly disturbing, cold, open ended and often about middle aged women and couples in strained relationships. Be warned they are quite disturbing, so this isn\u2019t a book for everyone \u2014 a woman buys clothes for little boys and finds pleasure in hoping to watch them dress, sadomasochism, wife murdering her own infant because of her husband\u2019s infidelity etc.<\/p>\n
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11.Written in tears by Arupa Patangia Kalita, translated from the Assamese by Ranjitha Biswas<\/h3>\n Republished in 2019, Written in Tears<\/em> is one of the best short story collections from India. There are insights into the culture of the riot-ridden Assam, ample folk tales and superstitions and the fear crowding the minds of normal people living in an insurgent land. Some stories are as real as could be while some are tinged with magical realism, in either case they shine light on a land and people who are often overlooked in their own country.<\/p>\nToddler Hunting and Other Stories translated from the Japanese<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n <\/p>\n
12.Flowers of Mold by Ha-Seong Nan, translated from the Korean by Janet Hong<\/h3>\n Ha Seong Nan\u2019s stories are described to be \u201cpleasant enough, yet there\u2019s something disturbing just below the surface, ready to permanently disrupt the characters\u2019 lives\u201d and I am here for it. A man who searches through garbage to relate to people, a plot to kill a landlord who increased the rent, a woman who suffers gaps in her memory after she helps a neighbour \u2014 these sound like my kind of stories.<\/p>\n
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13.Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder<\/h3>\n One of my highly anticipated reads of 2019 is Yoko Ogawa\u2019s dystopian tale on memory, trauma and loss. I love how Ogawa is so different in each of her books, my favourite being The Housekeeper and the Professor<\/em> (about friendship and mathematics)<\/a><\/span>. Evident from the title, this is a world dominated by \u2018memory police\u2019; things disappear and so do memories associated with them. But what happens when bodies disappear?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
14.River of Fire by Qurratulain Hyder<\/h3>\n River of Fire<\/em> to Urdu fiction is said to be what \u2018One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is to Hispanic literature\u2019 (London Times Literary Supplement). It was initially published in Urdu in 1959 and then written in English by the author herself in 1998. A lovely new edition of the book is published by New Directions this year. The novel covers more than 2500 years of the history of the sub-continent (modern day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) through Muslim, Christian, Hindu and Buddhist characters who appear in reincarnations, from the Vedic era to post partition (post 1947). The only reason I haven\u2019t picked this up yet is because of its intimidating size and scope. Fingers crossed I rectify this soon.<\/p>\n