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Reviewers & Critics: Laura Miller of Slate

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Twenty Years of Slate

It’s been twenty years since Michael Kinsley, the former editor of The New Republic , undertook a novel adventure: the creation of a magazine, underwritten by Microsoft, that was to exist primarily in what was then known as “cyberspace.” “There will be efforts to update it, perhaps on a daily basis,” the Times noted, in a report that appeared below the fold on page D1 of its issue of Monday, April 29, 1996, two months before the launch of Slate.

Recently, Kinsley, who was the editor-in-chief of Slate from 1996 until 2002, and his three successors—Jacob Weisberg, David Plotz, and Julia Turner—gathered in Washington, D.C., to record a podcast: a five-way conversation with Josh Levin, the magazine’s executive editor. It was a nostalgic and forgivably self-regarding celebration of what Turner characterized as Slate’s “smarty-pants, curious journalism, opinion, and analysis.” The editors posed, grinning, for a group photo.

“We probably need to airplane mode,” Turner said, fiddling with her phone.

“I turned off any signalling for text, because my kids just text all the time,” Weisberg said. “Nate was, like, ‘You can’t do that—how can I get in touch with you?’ ”

Everyone but Kinsley wore headphones. Turner said, “I would feel weird podcasting without headphones.” As virtual tape rolled, they recalled Slate’s début. The first issues had page numbers; Kinsley expected that readers would print them. For the most part, the site updated only once a week. There was a button that a reader could click on to hear a song by Fats Waller.

“Was the idea that you would have nice music to accompany you while you were printing it out?” Turner, who has been the editor since 2014, asked.

“The idea was that we had this new technology, and we ought to do anything that we could to exploit it, to counteract the disadvantage of having to read it on the computer,” Kinsley said. He praised colleagues who were bold enough to forgo traditional print careers in order to pursue what to many observers at the time seemed a quixotic endeavor. “Jacob took more risk than anyone at Slate, because you were the political correspondent of New York magazine,” he said, to Weisberg. “And you traded that in for this mysterious thing.”

“For a job at Microsoft, with stock options,” Weisberg averred. He was the editor from 2002 until 2008, and is now Slate’s C.E.O., having orchestrated its purchase by the Washington Post Company, in 2005.

The editors surveyed the magazine’s contributions to what are now conventions of online media: links in stories, aggregation, crowdsourcing. “I think we invented the slide show,” Weisberg said, with a note of regret. There was an analysis of what Plotz, the editor from 2008 until 2014, called “Slateyness,” a tone of contrarian inquiry. One story was recalled with glee: “How Complicated Was the Byzantine Empire?,” by Brian Palmer, scrutinized the political structures of medieval Constantinople and found them to be substantially less complex than those of modern governments.

After an hour or so, the recording stopped and the headphones came off. The chat continued. There was fond recollection of company retreats during which the staff divided into teams for softball: Christians versus Jews. Plotz mentioned Matt Drudge, whom the magazine had once tried to enlist to write “Today’s Papers,” a daily survey of the news, which was discontinued in 2009.

“That, actually, was my bad idea,” Weisberg said.

“That was a great idea!” Plotz said. “History would have taken a different turn.”

“The thing I forgot to ask was, How close were we to publishing the Lewinsky tapes?” Levin said.

There were “_Ahh! _”s all around.

“Jonah had them in a drawer in the office,” Kinsley said. Plotz launched into a scattered account: Slate once shared office space with a production company where a young television producer named Jonah Goldberg worked. His mother, Lucianne Goldberg, a literary agent, was the conduit through which the world learned of Monica Lewinsky’s confessions of intimacy with President Clinton, secretly recorded by Linda Tripp, Lewinsky’s onetime friend.

A producer entered the room: “You sure you don’t want to put the headphones back on and do this for real? This is good.”

Everyone except Kinsley restored the headphones. They reënacted the conversation—adding details for the benefit of those many listeners who might not remember the nineteen-nineties, and how things worked all those long years ago. ♦

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What Makes a Good Editor?

Lauren o'neal.

• October 14, 2013

In a conversation for the  Slate Book Review , author Donna Tartt and her editor Michael Pietsch talk through the experience of editing her latest novel from both sides of the red pen.

It’s a fascinating insight into the near-magical possibilities of good editing—and what separates it from bad editing. For example, here’s this from Tartt:

There’s nothing like having a sympathetic reader who asks the right questions, who understands what you’re trying to achieve and only wants to make it better. The best fixes are seamless—solutions that are in plain sight but you haven’t seen yourself, that someone else has to point out to you.

( Image via .)

Lauren O'Neal is an MFA student at San Francisco State University. Her writing has appeared in publications like Slate , The New Inquiry , and The Hairpin. You can follow her on Twitter at @laureneoneal .

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Book Reviews

Jenny slate's 'little weirds' is just not weird enough.

Little Weirds

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The actress and comedian Jenny Slate opens her memoir-in-essays Little Weirds with an "Introduction/Explanation/Guide for Consumption" — a description of her stage fright, which doubles as a description of her nerves about writing a book.

"On stage and everywhere else," she writes, "I know there is so much you could do to me. My vulnerability is natural and permissible and beautiful to me, and it should remind you of your responsibility to behave like a friend to me and the world." Later in the introduction, she puts an even finer point on it, writing, "I'm setting the tone and the tone is this: There is a free, wild creature up here, and now you must think about how to take her in and keep her alive."

All Slate's tone-setting puts a critic in a tough position. If I dislike Little Weirds , or find it in various ways wanting, am I no longer a friend to the world? Am I guilty of killing wild creatures? Or can I be a friendly, wild-creature-loving accepter of vulnerability and still wish that Little Weirds demonstrated more of the tonal range, irreverent wildness, and utter self-exposition that characterize Slate's stand-up?

I do wish all of the above. Mostly, I wish that Little Weirds were weirder, and more intimate. In Slate's new Netflix special, Stage Fright , she mixes decades-old home videos and filmed interviews with her family members into the live stand-up set she performs. The result is pleasingly choppy and highly personal. It keeps the viewer both off-balance and engaged. Little Weirds , in contrast, slides by smoothly and vaguely. Slate's essays tend toward the short, casual, and mildly silly, and her language strikes a balance between oddly flat statements and endearingly specific word choices enlivened by the occasional Seussian rhyme, as when she declares that she will no longer engage in "rude and crude struggle[s]." But Slate's rhymes and specificities disguise the fact that her essays' content is quite mainstream and sometimes fuzzy. She writes, without much detail, about the end of her marriage, her grief over Donald Trump's electoral victory, the joy she takes in family and friendship, her hopes for a bright romantic future, and her steps toward self-acceptance and self-love.

These are topics that could easily lend themselves to fun, rowdy, strange writing, but only if Slate were as open to self-exposure on the page as she is in her stand-up. Because she shies away from it in Little Weirds , however, her essays often fall a bit flat. Take "Geranium," which opens, "A mistake has been made about wildness." Wildness, Slate decides, is "holy." It "belongs in people" and "in the home." This revelation comes not in the context of her own wildness, but that of geraniums blooming inside a castle. To Slate, these geraniums demonstrate that we should "bring wildness [inside] and care for it." She gives instructions: "Place a shell in your shower. Get a whole plant in there. Put a geranium in your kitchen. Stand in your space and howl out." This reads, to me, less like weirdness than like mild self-help — which is, ultimately, Little Weirds ' dominant ethos.

Fundamentally, Slate's purpose in Little Weirds seems to be steering the reader toward finding his or her own vulnerability as "natural and permissible and beautiful" as she finds her own. This is admirable, but not strange. Even Little Weirds ' experiments tend to contain ideas that are not experimental at all. Take the essay "Fur," which opens "I dreamed I lifted up my little breasts and lining their undersides was a soft white- and toffee- colored fur." The fur is "soft and clean," and touching it is like touching "a dearness for and in myself." This may seem odd, but it becomes familiar the moment Slate gets to the dream's root. She wants to be " the real animal of myself " — a desire that should be recognizable to anyone who's read the poet Mary Oliver's beloved "Wild Geese," which opens:

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Like Oliver, Slate equates self-acceptance with animal nature, and equates animal nature with softness. Fair enough — but not wild, or weird.

Little Weirds is full of soft and lovely moments. In "Beach Animals," Slate beautifully evokes the pleasures of female friendship, and in "I Died: Sardines," she delightedly evokes the pleasures of sardine sandwiches. In "Sit?" she watches "a little boy put his puppy on a skateboard and say, 'Patrick. Sit?'" I may be a hard-hearted wild-creature-killer, but even I am not immune to the charms of a skateboarding puppy named Patrick. I am, however, disinterested in loveliness for its own sake. I prefer Slate in Stage Fright , in which she imitates skeletons, invites viewers into her grandmother's closet, and talks about sex in an alarming and hilarious baby voice. Those weirds are the right weirds for me.

Lily Meyer is a writer and translator living in Cincinnati, Ohio.

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Slate, the Pioneering Web Magazine, Struggles to Find Identity and Profit

After high-profile departures, the publication is trying to find a new voice.

By Katie Robertson

In early January, two days after an abrupt announcement that the top editor of Slate was stepping down, the publication’s staff signed into a Zoom meeting with the company’s chief executive and a consultant for Graham Holdings, the publication's owner.

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The Center for Cartoon Studies

Stories tagged slate book review, announcing the winners of the seventh cartoonist studio prize.

The best print and web comic of 2018, selected by the Slate Book Review and the Center for Cartoon Studies:

The winner for  Best Print Comic  is  Chlorine Gardens  by Keiler Roberts, published by Koyama Press. Roberts’ autobiographical comic skitters through stories of parenting, family life, and illness with deadpan wit and narrative ingenuity.

The winner for  Best Web Comic  is  “Being an Artist and a Mother”  by Lauren Weinstein, published on newyorker.com. Weinstein’s comic takes a gimlet-eyed look at the challenge of making art about motherhood while actually being a mother.

Congratulations to both of this year’s winners and all of our nominees!

Go to Slate.com to read the full story and to see the shortlist!

Tags: Slate , Slate Book Review , slate studio prize

Past Cartoonist Studio Prize winners of Best Print Comic

Pages from Libby’s Dad by Eleanor Davis, winner of 2017 Best Print Comic

The Cartoonist Studio Prize is back for it’s sixth year. Two creators, one each for print and online, are selected each year and receive $1,000. Every year, the judges are Slate’ s Jacob Brogan, a CCS representative (this year, Kevin Czap), and a guest judge (this year, Andrew Farago from San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum). Submissions are currently open an any English comic published in 2017 is eligible, so submit before the deadline, January 31, 2018.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: A Silent Hell , AdHouse , Andrew Farago , Beautiful Darkness , Blacksad , Boxers and Saints , Brandon Graham , Building Stories , Carol Tyler , Cartoon Art Museum , Cartoon Studies , cartoonist studio prize , Chris Ware , Curveball , Dark Horse , Drawn and Quarterly , Eleanor Davis , Fantagraphics , First Second , Gene Luen Yang , Gilbert Hernandez , Heads or Tails , Here , How to Be Happy , Image Comics , Jacob Brogan , Jeremy Sorese , Jillian Tamaki , Juan Diaz Canales , Juanjo Guarnido , Julia Wertz , Julio's Day , kerascoet , Kevin Czap , King City , Koyama Press , Libby's Dad , Lilli Carré , Mariko Tamaki , Nobrow , Pantheon , Retrofit Comics , Richard McGuire , Rolling Blackouts , Rom Hart , Rosalie Lightning , Sarah Glidden , Slate , Slate Book Review , Slate Cartoonist Studio Prize , Soldier's Hear , Sonny Liew , Sophie Goldstein , St. Martin's Press , Sunny , SuperMutant Magic Academy , Taiyo Matsumoto , The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye , The Infinite Wait , The Oven , This One Summer

6th Annual Studio Prize

The  Slate Book Review  and The Center for Cartoon Studies are proud to announce the sixth annual  Cartoonist Studio Prize !

Each year the Cartoonist Studio Prize is awarded to two cartoonists whose work exemplifies excellence in cartooning. It aspires to celebrate the best work in the medium. Both established creators and new voices are encouraged to submit. ( Last year’s winners : Eleanor Davis and Christina Tran.) The creators of two exceptional comics will be awarded $1,000 each. Winners will be selected by  Slate ’s Jacob Brogan, the faculty and students of The Center for Cartoon Studies (represented by Kevin Czap), and this year’s guest judge: Andrew Farago of San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum.

For details, visit: cartoonstudies.org/studioprize

Tags: Andrew Farago , Cartoon Art Museum , cartoonist studio prize , Christina Tran , Eleanor Davis , Jacob Brogan , Kevin Czap , Slate , Slate Book Review , studio prize

Announcing the Winners of the Fifth Cartoonist Studio Prize

Slate Book Review and The Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS) are proud to announce the winners of the fifth annual Cartoonist Studio Prize!

The winner for Best Print Comic is Eleanor Davis for Libby’s Dad (Retrofit and Big Planet Comics)

The winner for Best Web Comic is Christina Tran for “ On Beauty ,” a story about medical tourism in South Korea.

The winners were selected by  Slate ’s   Jacob Brogan; the faculty and students at The Center for Cartoon Studies, represented by Jarad Greene ; and this year’s guest judge, Karen Green, curator for comics and cartoons at Columbia University’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Library.

See the incredible short list of comics on  Slate.com !

Tags: Big Planet Comics , cartoonist studio prize , Christina Tran , Comic , Comics , Eleanor Davis , Graphic Novel , Jacob Brogan , Jarad Greene , Karen Gree , Libby's Dad , On Beauty , Print Comic , Retrofit , Slate , Slate Book Review , Web Comic

The Return of the Cartoonist Studio Prize

Each year the Cartoonist Studio Prize will be awarded to two cartoonists whose work exemplifies excellence in cartooning. ( Last year’s winners : Richard McGuire and Winston Rowntree.) The creators of two exceptional comics will be awarded $1,000 each. Winners will be selected by  Slate Book Review  editor Dan Kois, the faculty and students of The Center for Cartoon Studies, and a distinguished guest judge. This year’s guest judge will be Caitlin McGurk of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. Read more on Slate.com…

To enter your work, click here !

Tags: cartoonist , cartoonist studio prize , Chirs Ware , Comics , Emily Carroll , Graphic Novel , Manga , Noelle Stevenson , Richard McGuire , Slate , Slate Book Review , Taiyo Matsumoto , Winston Rowntree

The Cartoonist Studio Prize: The Shortlists

The Slate Book Review  and The Center for Cartoon Studies are proud to announce the print and web nominees for the third annual Cartoonist Studio Prize! Click here to see the complete list .

Tags: cartoonist studio prize , Comics , Dan Kois , Graphic Novel , Paul Karasik , Slate , Slate Book Review , Sophie Yanow , Web Comic

Third Annual Cartoonist Studio Prize

Tags: Billy Ireland Cartoon Library , Book Review , Caitlin McGurk , Cartoon Studies , Cartooning , cartoonist , cartoonist studio prize , CCS , Chris Ware , Comics , Dan Kois , Emily Carroll , Gene Luen Yang , Graphic Novel , Graphic Novelist , Illustrated Novel , Lilli Carré , Manga , Noelle Stevenson , Paul Karasik , Richard McGuire , Slate , Slate Book Review , Taiyo Matsumoto , The Center for Cartoon Studies , Web Comic , Winston Rowntree

The Cartoonist Studio Prize: The Shortlist

The 10 graphic novels and 10 Web comics up for Slate’s second annual comics prize.  Click  here  to see the nominees for best graphic novel and web comic of the year! The list includes ambitious work by lifetime masters of the medium and first comics by talented young artists.

Tags: Cartoon Studies , CCS , Graphic Novel , Slate Book Review , studio prize , Web comics

The Cartoonist Studio Prize

Each year the  Cartoonist Studio Prize  will be awarded to work that exemplifies excellence in cartooning. The creators of two exceptional comics (Graphic Novel, Web Comic) will be awarded $1000 each. Winners will be selected by  Slate   Book Review editor Dan Kois,  the faculty and students of The Center for Cartoon Studies, and a distinguished guest judge. This year’s guest judge will be Christopher Butcher of the world- famous comic book store  The Beguiling  and co-founder of the  Toronto Comic Arts Festival . Click,  here , to read the complete story on Slate.com

Submission forms and entry details can be found here: cartoonstudies.org/studioprize

Submissions in both categories must be received by December 31.

Special thanks to our sponsors this year!:

Tags: Dan Kois , Slate Book Review , Strathmore Paper , studio prize , TCAF , The Beguiling

Cartoonist Studio Prize Winners Announced

The Slate.com Cartoonist Studio Prizes for best Graphic Novel and best Web Comic of 2012 have been awarded!

Best Graphic Novel: Building Stories , by Chris Ware

Best Web Comic: Nimona , by Noelle Stevenson

Congratulations to the winners! For more information about the Cartoonist Studio Prize and the rest of the nominees, click here .

Tags: Building Stories , cartoonist studio prize , Chris Ware , Nimona , Noelle Stevenson , Slate Book Review

MFA and Certificate Program

Make a gift to ccs, online and in-person workshops, join ccs enews, cartoon club, the schulz library, free one-week cartooning workout, a free one-week cartooning workout.

A free self-directed eCourse to improve your cartooning skills. Online, Start Anytime !

THE ED KOREN SCHOLARSHIP FUND

Click here  to learn more and make an online donation now.

BIPOC Cartoonist Fund Accepting Donations

CCS wants your old comics! These comics and many more were donated to support CCS's BIPOC Cartoonist Fund. If you're interested in making a comic book or cash donation  drop us a line . 

FREE COMICS

Cartooning in an anxious age.

Cartooning In An Anxious Age (pdf) is a free comic by Cara Bean on the act of drawing, which focuses your attention and intimately connects you with the generative act of creation. It’s an inspiring read.

Let's Talk About It: A Graphic Guide to Mental Health

Created for middle and high school students, Let’s Talk About It: A Graphic Guide To Mental Health is a lively and educational comic book that destigmatizes the conversation around mental health.

A 32-page comic on how our government works

Using the power of comics to teach teens about the way our government works This Is What Democracy Looks Like, A Graphic Guide To Governance is a 32-page comic book created by The Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS). This short comic guide helps to bring democracy back to the hands of the people by explaining what democracy actually means and how the whole thing works. This guide will be a great jumping-off point to learn about our government.

The Applied Cartooning Manifesto

Download a free copy of The World is Made of Cheese, The Applied Cartooning Manifesto.

© The Center for Cartoon Studies PO BOX 125, White River Junction, Vermont 05001 [email protected] 802.295.3319

The Internet’s old guard general interest publication has never slowed down

[ Profile updated May 4, 2012 ]

Indeed, Slate’s relationship with its audience has become a hallmark of the site’s identity. “If you look at Slate readers, they’re really well-educated and they’re really interesting and provocative and in the last few years we’ve really looked at ways to take advantage of this in intelligent ways,” says Plotz. While many publications have experimented with reader-generated content, few have gone as far as Slate, where the process has moved off the web and into the real world. Through a partnership with the New America Foundation, Slate has begun holding half a dozen conferences a year in which readers have met up to crowd-source problems in person, the results of which have been published online for yet more audience participation. Not that Slate has lost faith in purely journalist-generated content. In fact, it’s one of the few publications in any medium investing in long-form writing. Each member of Slate’s editorial staff is required to take four to six weeks out of each year to focus on a project outside of the news cycle. Internally these are called “ Fresca ” projects, and they’ve led to some of Slate’s most worthwhile content. “There’s always been the notion at Slate where if you had an idea for some kind of bigger project you could go out and do it,” says Plotz, who talked about Slate’s ongoing efforts in long-form content at South by Southwest in 2012.

Founded by Michael Kinsley, named “Editor of the Year” by CJR in 1999 for his work on the publication, Slate was originally part of Microsoft. It was purchased by The Washington Post Company in 2004 and is now the flagship/namesake of The Slate Group, a quiver of web properties that includes The Root and Foreign Policy (though FP is unique in the Slate group as a print magazine founded in 1970, it too boasts a robust web presence). [UPDATE: Foreign Policy is no longer part of The Slate Group as The Washington Post Company spun the magazine and its website into a separate division called FP Group in January 2012.] Members of The Slate Group share business, technology, and marketing resources. Until recently, Slate and The Washington Post had shared a digital ad sales team. That changed in late 2011, when the publication was finally allowed to create its own sales and marketing team. According to Ad Age , part of the reason for this was the site’s “increasingly moving beyond traditional display advertising… and crafting more custom sponsorship packages for its advertisers” such as videos, product placements, and widgets.

In another sign of progress, Slate finally did away with Gutenberg, the CMS it had been using for 10 years. Just prior to the launch of the new CMS, Slate worked on improvements to story metadata that significantly increased the site’s search compatability: search traffic in August 2011 was 22 percent higher than the same month in 2010.

Slate suffered a major loss in 2011 when it laid off media columnist Jack Shafer, “Chatterbox” columnist Timothy Noah, and two other full-time editorial staffers. As Erik Wemple reported at the time, the move came shortly after The Washington Post Company had a particularly lousy quarter in which online publishing revenues dropped 13 percent .

The site’s reporting continues to gain notice, however. In 2011, Slate took home the National Magazine Award for General Excellence in the category of Digital Media, News and Opinion and tied with National Geographic for the most NMA Digital Ellie nominations.

The continued success of Slate can really be attributed to the way it has combined old-fashioned articles and reporting with web 2.0 concepts, such as multimedia presentations (including an active podcast life and a video-only offshoot ) and readership involvement. They’re both fundamental parts of the publication, and while it continues to evolve over time, Slate has adjusted its methods but never its goals. “The thing that we have to always give our readers is that when they come to Slate they get a perspective that is delivered with intellectual rigor and wit, that’s interesting and compelling and unexpected,” says Plotz. “I think we do that day after day after day very well.”

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Book Review: 'We're Alone' by Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat weaves personal and political

Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat explores family, homeland and her literary heroes in “We're Alone,” a new volume of essays that include personal narratives of her early years as child immigrant in Brooklyn to reportage of recent events like the assassination of a president back in her native county.

In the essay collection, the author of the celebrated memoir “Brother, I'm Dying,” and novels like “Breath, Eyes, Memory” and “Claire of the Sea Light,” moves from her native Port-au-Prince to the New York of her childhood and finally to the adopted hometown of Miami, where she lives as an adult with a family of her own.

In one essay in the slim volume, Danticat contemplates her family, describing the consequences of one uncle being gripped by dementia, his memory erased, his past suddenly vanished.

“An entire segment of our family history, of which he was the sole caretaker, was no longer available to us. Or to himself," Danticat recalled.

Yet, she wrote, “family is not only made up of your living relatives. It is elders long buried and generations yet unborn, with stories as bridges and potential portals. Family is whoever is left when everyone else is gone.”

Another essay pays homage to distinguished writers of color she admires, including James Baldwin and Colombian Gabriel García Márquez.

On the plane to Grenada for a tourism conference, Danticat considers the work of Black feminist Audre Lorde, reading the essay Lorde wrote about the island just weeks after the 1983 U.S. invasion of her parents' homeland.

Danticat fondly remembers the time she spent with friend and mentor American novelist Toni Morrison, including their participation in a conference in Paris.

And she reflects on the earthquakes and hurricanes that have rocked her native Haiti and other Caribbean countries in recent decades, following centuries of colonization.

“'We are a people,' is what we have been saying for generations to colonizers, invaders and imperialists hellbent on destroying us. And now, more than ever, Mother Nature, too."

AP book reviews: https://apnews.com/hub/book-reviews

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Flavour lost | Review of ‘The Penguin Book of Bengali Short Stories’, edited by Arunava Sinha Premium

The stories in this collection are wide-ranging but lose their innate bengali-ness in the translation.

Updated - September 20, 2024 03:33 pm IST

In the stories, we do get an impression of Bengali literature, but several times removed from the real thing. | Photo Credit: Getty Images

Many Gen Z Bengalis in Kolkata are only capable of reading their favourite Feluda stories by Satyajit Ray in English translation. For the benefit of this ever-expanding class and others as well, it has become imperative to render into English the treasures of Bengali literature. In certain Kolkata circles, the mother tongue is only used for communicating with the underclass. Translations are their only means of savouring Bengali literature. It may be one of the most widely spoken languages in the world but Bengali certainly faces several challenges today.

An award-winning and prolific translator, Arunava Sinha, the editor of  The Penguin Book of Bengali Short Stories , has selected 37 Bengali short stories, of which he has translated all but five. The other translators are Pushpita Alam, Anish Gupta, Arifa Ghani Rahman, V. Ramaswamy and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. This book could serve as a primer for those unacquainted with Bengali literature. This is an inclusive selection, and is an appetising mix of undisputed classics as well as the works of popular authors from both West Bengal and Bangladesh. Manoranjan Byapari represents Dalit prowess.

It is, however, by no means a definitive collection, dictated as it is by Sinha’s personal tastes. It begins with Rabindranath Tagore and ends with Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay, who is a  cause célèbre  in her own right. One looks in vain for the works of Satinath Bhaduri, Kamal Kumar Mazumdar, Debesh Roy, Nalini Bera, Syed Shamsul Haque and Shawkat Ali. Strangely, Sinha has included Purnendu Pattrea’s suite of 41 poems,  Conversations  ( Kathopokathan ), in this volume. Can it be termed a short story? Sinha also seems to have a penchant for cinema. Some of the stories have been turned into successful films by leading directors.

Like chalk and cheese

These short stories cover a wide swathe of the subcontinent’s turbulent socio-political history. The evils of the caste system (‘Paradise of the Wretched’), sectarian violence (‘Aadaab’), religious bigotry (‘India’) and patriarchy (‘Getting Physical’), as well as earth-shaking events like the Partition, famines, the Naxalite movement (‘Draupadi’) and the sanguinary birth of Bangladesh (‘The Raincoat’) are some issues they highlight. The crises of survival faced by middle-class Bengalis on both sides of the border are closely examined. Some writers occasionally stray into the world of dreams, as in ‘The Old Man of Kusumpur’ and ‘Why There Are No Noyontara Flowers in Agargaon Colony’.

But while the reader will easily follow the storyline and gather some idea of the social milieu, the distinctly individual voices of the writers are smothered by the juggernaut of standard English. The latter has as much in common with the ecosystem of the Bengali language as do the idiomatic chalk and cheese.

In translation, the swear word “ mairi ” in Tagore’s ‘Dead or Alive’ becomes a tame “really”. The percussive beat of “ jham jham bol ” in ‘The Raincoat’ turns into “pitter-patter drizzle”. The wild music of the Santals and regional dialects, in ‘Draupadi’ and ‘The Old Man of Kusumpur’, respectively, are inhibited by the dictates of the Queen’s language. We do get an impression of Bengali literature, but several times removed from the real thing.

The reviewer is interested in Kolkata’s vanishing heritage and culture.

The Penguin Book of Bengali Short Stories

Ed. arunava sinha.

Published - September 20, 2024 09:20 am IST

Related Topics

The Hindu Sunday Magazine / Literary Review / books and literature / authors and poets / fiction / Indian fiction / short stories / West Bengal

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