Storizen Magazine June 2019 | Madhulika Ra Chauhan Storizen Magazine June 2019 | Madhulika Ra Chauhan | Page 30

STORIZENEVENTS
HOT OFF THE PRESS
Blue Is Like Blue is Shukla’s only collection of short fiction, available in English
translation for the first time
Stark and mesmerizing, these
stories
puzzle,
disturb
and
seduce
the
reader.
Shukla
whittles reality down to its bare
poetic core. – Amitabha Bagchi
Vinod Kumar Shukla's world is set
just a little bit askew and, thus,
the quotidian becomes unusual,
the
mundane
becomes
remarkable.
The
reader
is
persuaded to marvel anew at the
follies and foibles of the human
species. – Arshia Sattar
In what way is over-familiarity
akin to the uncanny? In what
sense are the lives we lead each
day in rooms, streets, and shops
not entirely our own? To find the
answer to these questions, we
must read the sui generis Vinod
Kumar Shukla, whose work
reminds us that deep originality
will always finds its own home
and language. His translators
have taken up the questions and
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challenges his work poses, and
these superb English versions
constitute their response. – Amit
Chaudhuri
There’s a vein of gold in
Chhattisgarh and it passes under
Vinod Kumar Shukla’s house in
Raipur. Shuklaji has been quietly
mining it for the past half-century
and more. The house key is
encrypted, so a sensible prowler
would give up and sit down with
any book by this great original;
these stories, deftly rendered, are
an excellent place to start. – Irwin
Allan Sealy Blue Is Like Blue is
Shukla’s only collection of short
fiction,
available
in
English
translation for the first time. The
stories here deal with ‘smaller-
than-life people’. They live in
rented accommodation, often in
single rooms, where one electric
bulb does for light. When the light
dims because of low voltage, it is
JUNE 2019