About the book
Writers of South Asian descent have been garnering more and more success, acclaim, and attention. Story-Wallah gathers the finest South Asian voices in fiction for the first time in a single volume. As Shyam Selvadurai writes in his introduction, “The stories jostle up against each other … The effect is a marvelous cacophony that reminds me of … one of those South Asian bazaars, a bargaining, carnival-like milieu. The goods on sale in this instance being stories hawked by story-traders: story-wallahs.” In this book, some of the world’s best fiction writers—Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Michael Ondaatje, Monica Ali etc—hawk their wares from different parts of the South Asian diaspora creating a virtual map of the world with their tales. These stories explore universal themes of identity, culture, and home, and Story-Wallah includes a rich array of experiences: a honeymoon in Sri Lanka, the trials of a Bangladeshi refugee in England, life on a sugar plantation in Trinidad, the attempts of an Indian family to arrange a marriage for their rebellious daughter. This anthology is essential reading for anyone with an interest in South Asian writers and the dynamic, important tales they have to tell.
Editions
Thomas Allen & Son Ltd, Canada, 2004
Houghton Mifflin, US, 2005
Reviews
“[O]nly those with an already intimate knowledge of South Asian diasporic fiction in English could fail to come away with an enriched perspective on the role of literature in a world shaped by migration and encounter.”
— Quill and Quire
