One Point Two Billion

As an empirical observation at any rate, short stories seem more in vogue than they were even a few years ago. Exactly why isn't clear: the claim sometimes made that individual short stories are more suitable for reading on portable devices doesn't explain publishers putting out more collections as books.

But the result is that readers who wish to sample an author or the literature of a country now have an increasing range of choices other than novels. And if one wants to sample contemporary Indian writing, one could hardly do better than One Point Two Billion, a new collection of stories by Mahesh Rao. These are pretty much everything short fiction should be: well-crafted, interesting and illuminating.