Heart Lamp: Selected Stories

Author

Banu Mushtaq

Original Works

Heart Lamp·A Path Marked by Footsteps·Haseena and Other Stories·A Poor Family's Daughter is No Girl·The Female Eagle Chooses Her Groom·Safeera·Fire Rain

Translator

Deepa Bhasthi

Format

Collection / Anthology

Language

English

Year

2024

Publisher

And Other Stories

Country

United Kingdom

Pages

192

ISBN

9781916751163

0000

Winner of the PEN Translates Award A monumental first collection in English from Banu Mushtaq: lawyer, activist, champion of Muslim women, and winner of India's highest literary honors. In the twelve stories of Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Published originally in the Kannada language between 1990 and 2023, praised for their dry and gentle humor, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq's years as a journalist and lawyer, in which she tirelessly championed women's rights and protested all forms of caste and religious oppression. Written in a style at once witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating, it's in her characters--the sparky children, the audacious grandmothers, the buffoonish maulvis and thug brothers, the oft-hapless husbands, and the mothers above all, surviving their feelings at great cost--that Mushtaq emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature, building disconcerting emotional heights out of a rich spoken style. Her opus has garnered both censure from conservative quarters as well India's most prestigious literary awards; this is a collection sure to be read for years to come.— Google Books