Malgudi Days – R.K. Narayan
Malgudi Days is a collection of short stories by R.K. Narayan published in 1943.
The book includes 19 stories, all set in the fictional town of Malgudi, located in South India. Each of the stories portrays a facet of life in Malgudi.
The stories in the book include:
- “An Astrologer’s Day”: A short story in which an astrologer meets his rival who he thought had for long been dead.
- “The Missing Mail”: A story about Thannappa, a postman who doesn’t deliver a letter because of celebrations in a house.
- “The Doctor’s Word”: A story about Dr Raman, a doctor who believes good words can’t save lives, but tells a lie to his friend about his bad health.
- “The Blind Dog”: A story about a blind beggar who catches a dog to guide him through the streets.
- “Fellow Feeling”: A story about Rajam Iyer, a Tamil Brahmin who is travelling in a train compartment.
- “The Tiger’s Claw”: A story about The Talkative Man, a recurring character in a few short stories and his story about fighting a tiger.
- “Iswaran”: A story about a boy named “Iswaran” who failed his Intermediate Exams ten times, and when he passes it, in happiness, he gets drowned in the river Sarayu.
- “Forty-Five A Month”: A story about Daughter(Shanta) and her father(Venkat Rao), how the relationship between them and how he turned to realize that family feelings and joined together.
- “The Snake Song”: A story about a musician narrating his experience why he had stopped playing the flute.
In the familiar setting of Holt, Colorado, home to all of Kent Haruf’s fiction, Addie Moore pays an unexpected visit to a neighbor, Louis Waters. Her husband died years ago, as did his wife, and in such a small town they naturally have known of each other for decades; in fact, Addie was quite fond of Louis’s wife. His daughter lives hours away in Colorado Springs, her son even farther away in Grand Junction, and Addie and Louis have long been living alone in houses now empty of family, the nights so terribly lonely, especially with no one to talk with.
‘I’m a dead woman, or I shall be soon…’
“Shadow Play” is the first in the series of “Kain Songket Mysteries” set in the northern state of Kelantan, Malaysia during the 1970s.
In an old mansion in Cennethisar (formerly a fishing village, now a posh resort near Istanbul) the old widow Fatma awaits the annual summer visit of her grandchildren: Faruk, a dissipated failed historian; his sensitive leftist sister, Nilgun; and the younger grandson, Metin, a high school student drawn to the fast life of the nouveaux riches, who dreams of going to America. The widow has lived in the village for decades, ever since her husband, an idealistic young doctor, first arrived to serve the poor fishermen. Now mostly bedridden, she is attended by her faithful servant Recep, a dwarf–and the doctor’s illegitimate son. Mistress and servant share memories, and grievances, of those early years. But it is Recep’s cousin Hassan, a high school dropout, and fervent right-wing nationalist, who will draw the visiting family into the growing political cataclysm, in this spell-binding novel depicting Turkey’s tumultuous century-long struggle for modernity.
