The Greatest Urdu Stories Ever Told: Aleph's new anthology of 25 stories from India, Pakistan
Memon's collection traces the journey of the short story in Urdu from the oral, and later written, 'dastan' in the early 1800s to its engagement with social realism and political protest.
In 2003, Sahitya Akademi published an anthology, Short Stories from Pakistan, translated from the Urdu (1998) into English by M. Asaduddin and edited by Intizar Hussain and Asif Farrukhi. In its preface, Hussain said, 'just after the Partition, the writers and
The collection includes well established names, such as Premchand, Manto, Ismat Chughtai as well as new voices such as Khalida Asghar and Sajid Rashid. What emerges, eventually, is a range of themes from the horrors of war, migration and exile in the classics to fear and desire ("Obscure Domains of Fear and Desire"), literacy, education and the love of learning ("The Shepherd"), mixed faith marriage and terror ("The Saga of Jaanki Raman Pandey"), trauma and lunacy both temporary and permanent, women's sexuality and situation in a highly patriarchal society.
