Customer Reviews

Story-Wallah: Short Fiction from South Asian Writers

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I picked this book up over the weekend and have not been able to put it down. I refuse! While I know that I should savor each story, I must greedily read them all as soon as possible because never before has such exquisite South Asian writing been compiled, and you will feel compelled to take it with you everywhere you go.

The introduction written by the editor is beautiful and shows his passion for the written word, is very honest and also gives a brief yet impressively detailed history of the region for those of us who are not natives, and the stories chosen represent writers and people from all over the world. One minute you're in Trinidad on a sugar plantation, the next in a wealthy home in South Africa. Some are side-splittingly funny, others sad, others very poignant.

Included is the perfect introduction to Salman Rushdie if you're unfamiliar with his work; it often seems daunting but now I feel ready to read more. You'll feel the same way about the other authors included in this collection, so be sure to keep a pen and paper handy because you will be ordering more of everything that you find here...each story is a rich literary truffle that seduces you, makes you come to this very site and order everything you can possibly find. Good thing most of them can be found here.

That is all.

Writer Shyam Selvadurai took on the difficult task of being the editor of a collection of short stories that tries to represent the colorful tapestries of South Asia. Story-Wallah: Short Fiction from South Asian Writers offers stories from such well-known writers as Salman Rushdie and Jhumpa Lahiri as well as writers not as well-known in the literary mainstream. The idea, Selvadurai explains in his introduction, is to offer the stories like the vendors common on any neighborhood street in India. Those vendors all have the "wallah" suffix added to their description--the "chai wallah" sells tea, the "sabji wallah" offers fresh vegetables, and the "story wallah," by Selvadurai's account, offers his or her readers the best in fiction. Anyone picking up this collection will certainly get a variety of voices and stories but all of these stories are most certainly rooted in their cultures, be they Indian, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, or Pakistani (among others represented in the book.)

Each of the 26 stories most definitely carries a sense of personal experiences. Characters work in factories or sugar cane fields, they endure racist and degrading remarks from non-South-Asian counterparts, and even within their own countries and cultures they fight systems by circumventing them. In reading through these harsh, cruel living conditions, each author internalizes his or her characters' trials, and no wonder: some of those trials originate with the authors themselves.

Rooplall Monar grew up in Guyana on a sugar estate and his story "Bahadur" recounts the efforts of a field laborer to get promoted to night watchman. Hanif Kureishi, born in 1954 to a Pakistani father and a British mother, learned first-hand what it meant to struggle between two cultures and recounts some of those difficulties in "We're Not Jews." And editor Selvadurai himself relives some of his own personal experiences as a gay youth in "Pigs Can't Fly," an excerpt of his novel Funny Boy, which focuses on a young man acknowledging the truth about his sexuality against the backdrop of the violent interactions in Sri Lanka between the Sinhalese and the Tamil Tigers.

For readers looking to get a glimpse into various facets of South Asian writers, Story-Wallah is a good beginning.

I am fascinated by cultures outside the U.S., particularly those of Asian, S. Asian & Middle Eastern countries where "arranged marriages" are still the norm & remain so in the 21st century. I wish to understand the pros & cons of these marriages and the empowerment of women in these cultures...where the power may lie "hidden"...utilized in sublte ways unseen by those looking in from the outside & those within. Well written short stories make for excellent bedtime reading!