A Clutch of Indian Masterpieces

The stories in this collection will make you see the world differently— as the greatest stories always do.

Starting with a ghost story by Rabindranath Tagore, India’s most famous writer and ending with a fable by Kanishk Tharoor, a writer who has come of age in the twenty-first century, these literary masterpieces showcase the extraordinary range and diversity of our storytelling tradition. The first recognizably modern Indian short stories were written in Bengal (by Tagore and others) in the second half of the nineteenth century and writers from other regions were quick to follow suit, often using the form to protest colonial oppression and the various ills afflicting rural and urban India.

Over the next century and a half, some of the finest writers the world has seen produced outstanding fiction in every conceivable genre. Many of these stories find a place in this volume, as does work by emerging talent that has never been published in book form before. Here you will find stories of classical realism, ones rooted in folklore and myth, tales of fantasy, humour, horror, crime and romance, stories set in villages, small towns, cities and the moon.

Features stories by beloved writers like Rabindranath Tagore, Anita Desai, U. R. Ananthamurthy, Khushwant Singh, Nirmal Verma, Harishankar Parsai, Vikram Chandra, Amrita Pritam, Upamanyu Chatterjee and others.