(excerpted from a short story by Prajwal Parajuly, who is on the shortlist for the 2013 Dylan Thomas Prize) Studying abroad was a malaise that was yet to afflict the northeast the way it had swept over the rest of India. It was uncommon, especially during Asim’s times, for a native of Shillong to study […]

The sudden drop in water pressure and the croaking shower awakened me to the muddy reality swirling around my feet. I stepped aside for a moment, but the water stayed murky, slimy. So I killed the shower and moved to the washbasin, but the faucet gushed forth something equally fetid. The signs pointed to a […]

An off-white ceiling fan coated with grime, probably installed during colonial times, whirred noisily as it spat a hot, dry gust that burnt wherever it touched bare skin. Suppressing a sudden impulse to scratch his groin, a tall, thin man in his early twenties

It was as if someone had shot a gun in the house, and all windows were thrown open to get the smell of sulfur out of the corners, Rabin thought as he opened his eyes and looked around the room, washed with the sunlight streaming in through the east and south windows. He hadn

I am not easily given to liking second-person stories. Often I find the mode artificial and gimmicky. But Pep Talk had a no nonsense quality about it that immediately sucked me in. I liked the narrator, and there was clearly a story here: one of love and heartache, of sexual experimentation and discovery. The telling […]

Krishna wakes to the sound of the downpour rioting on the slate roof and the wind churning at the battered pine windows. A deep sleeper, he hasn

A few days ago, Samrat Upadhyay sent us his shortlist for La.Lit’s first short story competition, Writing Nepal. We couldn’t keep it to ourselves for very long. So here we go, in no particular order except the alphabetical, the 7 shortlisted entries out of the 100+ we were flooded with: Byanjana Thapa – Chamomile Muna […]

The astrologer was a pleasant young man, with worn down cloth shoes and a dust-coloured set of clothes. Mohan Shamsher was surprised. He had expected someone older, someone more commanding. More authoritative. This man, with his humble cotton outfit, could not have been more than thirty, at the most.

On the first Sunday afternoon of February he announced to his friends that he would not be seeing any of them over the week beginning the next Sunday.