Literature and Fiction

Published on the occasion of the third anniversary of the paper, New Age Short Stories testifies to the role that the paper has played from the beginning in making Bangladeshi fiction, in English and in English translation, readily available to an English-reading audience. In the course of these three years, New Age has published so many stories that all of them could not be accommodated in one volume. Only stories that appeared from September 2003 to September 2005 have been included. When New Age started publication on June 7, 2003, it did not have a regular story feature.

In this second collection of short stories, Niaz Zaman brings the versatility of her pen and imagination to look at the world around her and tell the stories of men and women caught up in the business of living. While she often narrates her stories from the perspective of her women characters, she is also able to enter the minds of her male protagonist. What does it feel like when a man bids farewell to a child after divorce? How does a raw provincial react when he is in a cosmopolitan city for the first time?

The stories in this collection have been written over a period of twenty-five years and include both published and new writings. The earliest of the stories ‘A Study in Black and White’ and ‘The Interview’, data from the 70’s; The Dance’ was a prizewinner in the first Asiaweek Short Story Competition in 1981. Zaman’s characters range from ordinary housewives to domestic servants, from unwanted daughters to eccentric artists.

The essays in this anthology, a representative selection of papers presented at a seminar on Commonwealth literature, explore the many issues raised by the phrase Commonwealth Writing. Among the topics discussed am the nature and validity of the rubric Commonwealth Writing, the emotional or political justification for using a foreign language for creative purposes, the problems faced by Third World writers in reaching readers. The essays cover a wide geographic expanse, from Australia through India and Africa to Canada and the West Inches.