When India was struggling for its independence under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, Shaheed Bhagat Singh, Chandrashekhar Azad and many more, a girl was born in Matualalaya of Dhaka in Bengal Presidency of British India in a literary family of Ghataks. Manish Ghatak, well-known poet and novelist of the Kallol movement and Dharitri Devi, Writer and Social worker was blessed with a baby girl on 14th January 1926. With a strong alma matter of Vishwa-Bharati University and Calcutta University and literary culture at her home, Mahasweta Devi has written over 100 novels and over 20 collections of short stories.
The book I am bringing to you is called Bitter Soil. This is the collection of most compelling stories written by Mahasweta Devi which are translated from Bangla by Ipsita Chanda. Three of the stories in this collection were previously translated either by Devi herself or by other authors. The stories included in this collection sheds light on Devi’s political and economic humanism perspectives about human life. Mahasweta Devi has worked in the welfare of tribal communities of West Bengal, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh states of India. This interest in tribal welfare is always reflected in her stories. This collection not an exception to that either. Though the book is translated from Bengali, I have read it still carries the same excellence and mastery of storytelling. Thanks to Ipsita Chanda for giving access to these amazing stories told by one of India’s finest storytellers.
Mahasweta Devi has been a fiery storyteller which has done amazing work of waking and shaking up of Bengali people from slumber and become active to fight against injustice. She was awarded Padma Shri and Padma Bhushan for her social work and Sahitya Akademy Award for her novel Aranyer Adhikar. In 1996, she was awarded Dnyanapeeth Award which is the highest literary award in India. For her “compassionate crusade through art and activism to claim for tribal peoples a just and honorable place in India’s national life.” Raman Magsaysay Award was conferred upon her in 1997. On her 92nd birth anniversary, Google celebrated her work by creating amazing doodle in her honor. As a reader, only tribute we can offer to this fiery Dnyanapeeth of India is enjoy her fantastic stories and I am starting with Bitter Soil.
Adding this to the amazing bucket of blogs at #BlogchatterA2Z.
Lydia Davis, An American writer who is famous for her flash fictions along with her short stories, novels and essays. Lydia Davis, born in Northampton, Massachusetts, USA, has translated many French literary classics, including Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. Her stories are full of wit, insight and genre-defying formal inventiveness. Many of her stories revolve around very common people which you can find around you and find particular moments in those common lives and bring a humor out of them.
Her one of the new story collection is ‘Can’t and Won’t’ published in 2013 contains the stories which comment on the quotidian, revealing the mysterious, the foreign, the alienating, and the pleasurable within the predictable patterns of daily life with very sly humor. Amy M. Homes, famous American writer known for her controversial novels and unusual stories, says nothing buy “read her now!” in praise of Lydia and Can’t and Won’t. Cover of a paperback book is very simple with the title and author name in white and a pleasant sky-blue color in the background. So, let’s go and meet the characters which Lydia has developed for these stories and try to enjoy what we all live on a day – to – day basis.
Ireland is equally famous for its literature and long tradition of fantastic storytelling as it is for its Guinness. Kevin Barry from Limerick City follows the same tradition of storytelling which reads like a modern-day Dubliners. Born in 1969, Kevin has to wait for his first ever story collection gets published. “There are little kingdoms” was published in 2007 and it received a huge critical acclaim and won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.
While describing his feeling about getting published after such a long wait, Kevin confessed to “haunting bookshops and hiding to spy on the short fiction section and see if anyone’s tempted by my sweet bait” in 
When you read such praising words for some storyteller, you don’t think twice before picking up her book as your TBR. Jhumpa Lahiri is Bengali storyteller born in England and brought up in Rhod Island USA. There’s a debate about her ‘Indian’ness as she hasn’t been in India for a major part of her life, but her stories revolve around Indians and Indian migrants in the west. Many of her stories are published in the American journal The New Yorker including The Long Way Home and Cooking Lessons. Her debut story “collection Interpreter of Maladies has won a prestigious Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and is my pick for this TBR entry of Adi’s Journal.
Yesterday, I took you to Assam to meet one of India’s fantastic storyteller Homen Borgohain. Today I would like to take you in 18th century Russia to meet Mr. Ivan Turgenev, one of the finest Russian novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright. It is said that he is the man behind popularizing Russian literature in the West. While East India Company were busy in clutching the power across India, Ivan Turgenev was writing fantastic stories about the Russian society.
When I wrote about George Saunders, I wrote about the choices we make every day. However, sometimes you are not satisfied with the choice. I am facing the same dilemma about the author I had chosen for letter H. No doubt Henry James is a fabulous storyteller from the transition period of realism to modernism. My mind was not able to connect with him. I was searching for new name, new figure to look up to. I summoned the services of “Uncle Google” but no satisfactory results came out. I wrapped my work for the day and head out to Crossword to window-shop with my friend. She picked up a couple of books and we were ready to head back to home. Just before we get to the counter, I met Homen Borgohain in form of a beautiful hardbound story collection and I took him home with me.
