A Midweek Haul

Last Sunday I did not go to Abids due to the Ganesh procession and the consequent traffic restrictions. A couple of years ago the immersion fell on a Sunday and somehow I went to Abids but was disappointed that no bookseller had turned up. I had to return empty handed. Since I experience a kind of withdrawal symptoms if I do not get my weekly fix of books at the Abids Sunday book bazaar I took adequate precautions. During the week I dropped in at two bookstores and ended up buying two good books that were coincidentally about short stories.

Sometime on Wednesday or Thursday I went to the Best Book Centre branch at Abids. There were a lot of books I wanted to buy but in the end I bought just one book. I found ‘English and the Indian Short Story’ edited by Mohan Ramanan and P.Sailaja. Inside it is written that the book is the result of a National Seminar on’English and the Indian Short Story’ held in August 1994 at the Department of English, University of Hyderabad. Though this is an academic book on the short story, needless to say, I bought it to find out what it has to say on the short story in India. Another reason that I bought this book was the first article in it by Ashokamitran titled ‘My Writing, My Times’ that I read standing in the store. He happens to be one of my favorite writers and I don’t miss anything by him that I find.

Again on Saturday I dropped in at was the Unique bookstore at Lakdikapul. I found a treasure of short stories in the form of a hefty volume titled ‘The Art of the Tale- An International Anthology of Short Stories’ edited by Daniel Halpern. This wonderful volume contains eighty two short stories by some well-known writers and also by writers I haven’t heard about before. There were some writers like Mavis Gallant I had been looking for and at last I managed to find one short story by her in this volume. This is the list of the eighty two stories and the writers in this book that I got for two hundred and fifty rupees.

Chinua Achebe -The Sacrificial Egg
Ilse Aichinger -The Bound Man
Vasily Aksenov - Little Whale, Varnisher of Reality
Margaret Atwood- Hair Jewellery
Ingeborg Bachmann- Everything
James Baldwin- Going to Meet the Man
Russell Banks- The Child Screams and Looks Back at You
Donald Barthelme- Cortes and Montezuma
Ann Beattie- Jacklighting
Samuel Beckett- First Love
Heinrich Boll- Action Will Be Taken
Wolfgang Borchert- Do Stay, Giraffe
Jorge Luis Borges- The Aleph
Tadeusz Borowski- This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
Abdeslam Boulaich- Cowardice
Paul Bowles- A Distant Episode
T. Coraghessan Boyle- Greasy Lake
Harold Brodkey- Ceil
Dino Buzatti, -Seven Floors
Italo Calvino- The Adventure of a Traveler
Albert Camus- The Adulterous Woman
Truman Capote- Children on their Birthdays
Raymond Carver- Fat
John Cheever- The Country Husband
Robert Coover- Quenby, and Ola, Swede and Carl
Julio Cortazar- Bestiary
Guy Davenport- The Haile Selassie Funeral Train
Isak Dinesen- The Cloak
E.L. Doctorow- The Hunter
Stanley Elkin- I Look Out for Ed Wolfe
Richard Wolfe- Communist
Carlos Fuentes- The Doll Queen
Mavis Gallant- The Chosen Husband
William Gass- Order of Insects
Natalia Ginzburg- The Mother
Nadine Gordimer- The Life of the Imagination
Graham Greene- Two Gentle People
Wolfgang Hildesheimer- Why I Transformed Myself into a Nightingale
Yasunari Kawabata- One Arm
Milan Kundera- Let the Old People Make Room for the Dead
Tommaso Landolfi- Gogol’s Wife
Doris Lessing- The Habit of Loving
Mario Vargas Llosa- The Challenge
Naguib Mahfouz- The Conjurer Made Off with the Dish
Bernard Malamud- The Last Mohican
Gabriel Garcia Marquez- Eyes of a Blue Dog
William Maxwell- The Pilgrimage
Ian McEwan- First Love, Last Rites
Leonard Michaels- The Deal
Yukio Mishima- Patriotism
Alberto Moravia- Jewellery
Mohammed Mrabet- Doctor Safi
Vlamimir Nabokov- Spring in Fialta
R.K. Narayan- Naga
Joyce Carol Oates- The Tryst
Edna O’Brien- Sister Imelda
Flannery O’Connor- The Artificial Nigger
Frank O’Connor- A Set of Variations on a Borrowed Theme
Amos Oz- Nomad and Viper
Cynthia Ozick- The Suitcase
Grace Paley- The Contest
Cesare Pavese- Suicides
V.S. Pritchett- The Saint
James Purdy- Eventide
Alain Robbe-Grillet- The Replacement
Merce Rodoreda- Rain
Leon Rooke- In the Garden
Juan Rulfo- Talpa
Nathalie Sarraute-XXII
Isaac Bashevis Singer- Henne Fire
Susan Sontag- Unguided Tour
Jean Stafford- Children Are Bored on Sunday
Peter Taylor- A Friend and Protector
Michel Tournier- Death and the Maiden
William Trevor- Beyond the Pale
John Updike- Separating
Luisa Valenzula- I’m Your Horse in the Night
Euodora Welty- No Place for You, My Love
Patrick White- Five-Twenty
Tobias Wolff- Hunters in the Snow
Richard Wright- Big Black Good Man
Richard Yates- The Best of Everything