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.