The Fiction of truth, the truth of fiction

Click here for the Munster Literature Centre and the 2009 Frank O'Connor Short Story Award longlist. "The End of the World" is in it.

I compiled this list for ECS Magazine's tenth anniversary edition. Read on... ____________________________ Ranking books is, of course, a highly subjective enterprise. Some books withstand the test of time, but which ones? Trying to hone it down to the top five is a tough, but not entirely dissatisfying, exercise. Please feel free to disagree. Fatalism and Development By Dor Bahadur Bista (1991, Calcutta: Longman) Agree or disagree with the now vanished Mr Bista, there is no doubt that this is one of the most cogently written, most interesting critiques of Nepali society. Why is Nepal a basket case? Read this book to find out. Intelligent men have disagreed with this classic. Western expatriate workers make this their Bible when they arrive and get jeered by those who want more complexity in their analysis. Yyoung students swoon over it. Liberal Brahmins have bemoaned how the book has been influential in justifying policies that discriminate against Brahmins in the developm...

Read my short story "The Blockade" in East of the Web. I wrote this story around 2005, and it is based on real political events in Nepal. Also fun to read are the comments that the story seemed to have elicited--it started off with somebody who didn't want to bother with " with too many characters with unpronounceable names", and it spirals off into a lively discussion with readers responding to this initial observer. Click on "view comments" to read the entire back-and-forth!