A Fistful of Salt: Selected Stories

by N. Prabhakaran

Translated by Jayasree Kalathil

English 232 pages 1 edition

‘Profoundly surreal, intensely melancholic and boldly exploratory.’ – DAMODAR MAUZO ‘N. Prabhakaran’s tales restore our sense of delight, not just in this literary form but in the crying human need for retrieving, remembering, retelling experience.’ – ANJUM HASAN ‘Vividly imagined and narrated with an unfailing tenderness, these stories extend our understanding of what it means to be human.’ – N. KALYAN RAMAN N. Prabhakaran arrived on the literary scene in 1971 at age eighteen, with his prize-winning story ‘The Mahout of a Rogue Elephant’. In the five decades since, across more than fifty books, he has come to be regarded as one of the pioneers of the postmodern turn in Malayalam literature. The stories gathered here, spanning Prabhakaran’s entire writing life, move between folklore and the fantastical, nature and nightmare, as they circle around the essential aloneness of the human condition. Here you will find: a dying man whose mind keeps returning to a fistful of salt and his father’s part in the Salt Satyagraha; a stolen vessel that uncovers the hidden wounds of a marriage; two migrant workers hounded off a crowded bus on a stormy night; a rooster that fulfils a man’s dark desire… Brought brilliantly into English for the first time by award-winning translator Jayasree Kalathil, A Fistful of Salt is a definitive introduction to the short fiction of one of Malayalam’s most significant and enduring writers.