“At times uproariously funny, uncannily accurate, and glaringly insightful, David Butler’s Fugitive is a collective exposé on human nature delivered in entertaining snippets with s
“Medusa’s Ankles opens with a haunting and strangely gentle ghost story (‘A July Ghost’) and ends with a terse contemporary fable about our feckless destruction of the planet (‘Sea
“These tales are presented as humorous, but it’s a humor that hides a piercing sorrow at the state of the world and the costs of love and friendship in such a world.”
“Few fiction writers have captured the trauma of India’s partition as powerfully as Saadat Hasan Manto, called ‘the undisputed master of the modern Indian short story’ by Salman Rushdie.”
This collection is not easy to approach because of the different realities and forms of expression it uses—and they might have been useful had they prompted deeper reflections. But not.
The short stories in Mary-Beth Hughes’ collection The Ocean House are linked, not by the titular manse—the last of the great seafront houses in Long Branch, New Jersey, its property covete