Check out the issues of “New Yorker” magazine. It would be of interest to all from Indian subcontinent. It’s another summer of Indian fiction in “The New Yorker”
For the third time in a row, the prestigious literary magazine The New Yorker has carried Indian fiction in its much-heralded summer issue. The New Yorker’s Summer Fiction issue – a bumper two-week number of the journal – carries two India-related pieces, in what is being seen as a sure sign that Indian fiction has arrived.
One is a shorter version of the essay titled Return to India that author Salman Rushdie published in The Times in London last week. The other is a debut by New York-based investment banker Akhil Sharma, two-time winner of the O. Henry award for short fiction.
The first of the summer issues in the series had India on the cover. The entire issue was devoted to the new names in Indian fiction who were making the genre an exciting new area of possibility. Writers featured included Rushdie, Vikram Chandra, Arundhati Roy and Amitav Ghosh.
The next summer’s issue featured Pulitzer prize-winner Jhumpa Lahiri as one among 20 of the best young fiction writers in America.
The magazine is considered extremely prestigious in literary circles. One appearance in it can make or break a new writer’s career. The magazine’s consistent publication of Indian writers is considered by cognoscenti a sure sign that Indian fiction has arrived.
Rushdie’s essay is an emotional account of his return to India for the first time since the ‘fatwa’ (death decree issued by late Iranian spiritual leader Ayatollah Khomeini) that changed his life. Under the slug ‘Letter From India’ and the headline ‘A Dream of Glorious Return’, Rushdie traces his first passages from and to “the country that has been my primary source of artistic inspiration.”
Akhil Sharma’s story, titled ‘Prosperity’, is an entirely different sort of endeavour. It is a story of violence and incest spotlighting an Indian son, then husband, then father, who grows up in Beri, “a village (in India) of a hundred mostly Brahman (upper caste Hindu) families living in one-room mud homes scattered over several small hills.”
Beri may be small but its terrors are as large as those of any big city. “Grown men used to rub kerosene on a bitch’s nipples and watch the dog bite herself to death… The father of a friend of mine clubbed his wife over the head with a piece of wood… The things that might mark me as unusual, or explain what I later did to my daughter Anita, were present in many other people in our village.”
The narrator – the story is told in first person – moves from poverty to prosperity by the end of the story. His children also prosper, except for Anita who grows up shy and anxious though “there was nothing about her that marked her as damaged.”