The award ceremony for Writing Nepal took place in the cosy premises of Educational Book House yesterday. Our judge, writer Samrat Upadhyay, was rendered speechless. (Well, almost, courtesy a bad case of laryngitis. But he...

It is growing increasingly irreverent and tiresome to hear Gautam Buddha and Mount Everest being used as reasons for Nepali pride. Both are geographical happenstances regarding which the Nepali nation made no conscious choice. When...

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...

Then, along came Uma. It had a lot of expectations attached to it – the actors are among the best of their generations, and the director Tsering Ritar Sherpa is a pioneer among his peers, for the breadth of his vision and for his courage to make fiction-films like Mukundo and Karma.

Standing in queue, with a cheque in hand, waiting for the tortoise-crawl to the counter, the back of the head of the man standing before me becomes an intimate: in the ten minutes since I...

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.

When Quixote's Cove, the bookshop this magazine is affiliated with, was established, it always wanted to wear more than a retailer's garb. It drew its inspiration from the romanticization of ideas that felt as though they...

After a very long time, I looked at a full-length mirror. A surface that could reflect the length and the breadth, the quirk and cookie, the flaw and full. I stood before a familiar face...

If the nature of a city and its people are reflected in the public/civic institutions they support, then Kathmandu appears distinctly barbaric. Our libraries are in shambles - they are run like museums, carrying bounded...