Winner of the 1982 Miles Franklin Award.Once a wild goldmining town, Whitey's Fall is now a small, brooding community of close and distant relations.One by one, the young are leaving for the alluring uncertainties of the world beyond. The old stay on, steadfast in their pride and sense of belonging. Remembering is their religion; the mountain is their altar. They are the guardians of the land's unbroken promise.But time brings strangers with different dreams, a different sense of justice. And their coming is a violation, a breakfast for parasites. Views: 14
After years of carousing and debauchery, Alex Cartwright has put his life back in order. Having embraced sobriety for two years, he has no intention of revisiting the past or risking his heart again. But the return of the very woman who introduced him to the darkest side of hell brings not only the painful, haunting memories of bittersweet love and abandonment, but the son he never knew he had.... Views: 14
An NYRB Classics OriginalBasti is a beautifully written reckoning with the tragic history of Pakistan. Basti means settlement, a common place, and Intizar Husain’s extraordinary novel begins with a mythic, even mystic, vision of harmony between old and young, man and woman, Muslim and Hindu. Then Zakir, the hero, wakes to the modern world. Crowds gather. Slogans echo. Cities burn. Whether hunkered down with family or furtively meeting to exchange news with friends in cafés, Zakir is alone in a country lost to the politics of loneliness.Review“This brilliant novel from Intizar Husain, one of South Asia’s greatest living writers, should finally end the scandal of his relative obscurity in the West.” —Pankaj Mishra“Intizar Husain is the most important writer of fiction in Urdu, the strangely homeless language produced out of interactions between the vernacular of north India and those of the Islamic Near East, Persian and Arabic in particular. In Basti he has produced a novel of epic ambition: a swirling storm of historical moments, scriptural traditions, and ancient mythologies, all harnessed around the convulsion of India’s partition along religious lines. By taking us through the internal life of his protagonist, Zakir—‘He who remembers’—Husain performs an act of civilizational memory and provides us with the fragments of a culture’s history that modernity has firmly set on the road to oblivion.” —Aamir R. Mufti“The uncharitable might say that but for the past, Intizar Husain would not have had a future. But truth to tell, the man who blends the personal with the impersonal, specific with the universal, actually has the past much to thank for. Be it drawing generously from the Jataka tales or the Panchatantra fables or even the layered Shiite tradition or the more modern existentialism, his tomorrows have been taken care of by yesterdays. Yet Intizar Husain does not live in the past, so much as he draws from it. His nostalgia is not comforting, there is that disquiet air that runs through his works, and Basti, arguably the finest novel on Partition, is no different. Distance in time often diminishes emotion, but in Husain's case it only serves to distil it: what goes away is the peripheral, what is retained is the essential.” —The HinduAbout the AuthorIntizar Husain (b. 1925) is a journalist, short-story writer, and novelist, widely considered the most significant living fiction writer in Urdu. Born in Dibai, Bulandshahr, in British-administered India, he migrated to Pakistan in 1947 and currently lives in Lahore. Besides Basti, he is the author of two other novels, Naya Gar (The New House), which paints a picture of Pakistan during the ten-year dictatorship of the Islamic fundamentalist General Zia-ul-Haq, and Agay Sumandar Hai (Beyond Is the Sea), which juxtaposes the spiraling urban violence of contemporary Karachi with a vision of the lost Islamic realm of al-Andalus. Collections of Husain’s celebrated short stories have appeared in English under the titles Leaves, The Seventh Door, A Chronicle of the Peacocks, and An Unwritten Epic.Frances W. Pritchett has taught South Asian literature at Columbia University since 1982. Her books include Nets of Awareness: Urdu Poetry and Its Critics, The Romance Tradition in Urdu: Adventures from the Dastan of Amir Hamzah, and (with Khaliq Ahmad Khaliq) Urdu Meter: A Practical Handbook.Asif Farrukhi is a writer and a physician trained in public health. He is a frequent contributor to the English-language press of Pakistan and the author of seven short-story collections, two essay collections, and a monograph on Intizar Husain. He is the editor of Fires in an Autumn Garden: Stories from Pakistan, Look at the City from Here: Writings About Karachi, and co-editor of Faultlines, a selection of stories about the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war, and has collaborated with Intizar Husain on the anthology Short Stories from Pakistan. Views: 14
How did Riot escape from the Night Church? How did she survive the Rot & Ruin — and the horrors of her own past? There’s only one way to find out…. Jonathan Maberry explores the origins of a fascinating new character in an exclusive e-short story set in the land of the Rot & Ruin. Views: 14
SynopsisScarborough, 1880. Young Jeannie spends her days watching her mother and the other harbour girls sitting at the water's edge - mending nets, gutting herring - and waiting for her friend Ethan Wharton to come in on his father's fishing smack. As she was growing up, Jeannie always expected to marry Ethan, who is loyal and dependable. But then she meets Harry - a stranger who has come to visit from Hull for the day - and she falls for him. He is exciting and irresistible, and seems very keen on her. But he breaks his promise to come back for her, and Jeannie finds herself young, pregnant and feeling very isolated. Jeannie moves to the port town of Hull where her new, difficult life with a child - touched by illness, tragedy and poverty - is often made bearable by the kindness of others. But she finds herself wishing for the simpler times of her past, wondering if she will ever find someone who will truly love her - and if Ethan will ever forgive her... Views: 14
Jack Barnett has had it with the private eye business. They took his license away in LA, and fearing criminal prosecution, he split town in the middle of the night and headed for Las Vegas, where anyone can become anonymous.He swears off the business, but his money runs low and when a man offers him $5000 to find his missing daughter, he agrees. He soon wishes he hadn't when the haunting memory of a woman from his past gets in the way. TEMPTATION TOWN is a novelette, about 12,000 words, the first of the Jack Barnett series from Mike Dennis. Set in the steaming underbelly of Las Vegas, these tales of a reluctant ex-private investigator drag the reader down the darkest streets of Sin City, USA, a town in constant need of fresh blood for its own survival. The book also comes with an exclusive preview of the second Jack Barnett installment, another novelette called HARD CASH. The third entry, a full novel called THE DOWNTOWN DEAL, is also currently available. Views: 14
The joys of reading and words come alive in this fresh and fun story about one girl's search for the perfect word. Views: 14
