Seventeen
Anita Agnihotri
Translator Arunava Sinha
Publisher: Zubaan Books
Summary
In these finely crafted, gorgeously inventive stories, Anita Agnihotri spins ferociously intelligent, gloriously original insights into everyday life. A brother and sister visit the unique crater lake that their dead, estranged mother had written to them about in her letters. A middle-class executive’s orderly life turns upside down when his employer holds back his pay cheque without explanation. The employees of a forgotten outpost in a sun-baked town threaten mass suicide because they have no hope of survival.Seventeen is a collection of short stories from Anita Agnihotri’s vast oeuvre. Intense, bitter, angry, and elegiac, the stories bring out different faces of human hardship, and explore a country that is still unknown to many. Set in metros and villages, in small-town India and international suburbia, Agnihotri’s stories run the gamut of experiences both everyday and extraordinary.