Wani Nazir — Excerpt: Choudhary doesn’t write about real life in the usual way; his world is strange and frenetic. The holy and the vile walk hand in hand. Sometimes a prayer turns into a protest. Sen has a hard job expressing that tilt, when faith turns into irony.
Shayista Jahan — Excerpt: Mushtaq has a sharp eye for women’s issues and portrays them honestly, without embellishment or complication. They are both contextual and universal in different ways. “The personal is political” is the overarching theme that the stories inevitably try to impart.
Wani Nazir — Excerpt: The main character, Maya, is not shown as a static person, but as a fluid being—a figure who is always being written, rewritten, and redefined. She is the postmodern subject, lost in a world of lies and shallow things.
Alice Moon — Excerpt: The therapist hums thoughtfully. “It’s definitely difficult to be a vampire in the 21st century.”
Chitra Gopalakrishnan — Excerpt: Neera Kashyap is quiet in her telling of daily complexities, bewilderment, frailties and failures of ordinary people within the microcosm she creates within each story... Light touches and restraint in her language co-exist with the potency of her querying and divulgences.