What is Saved: Batori Hui Khushiyan: Life Stories and Other Tales
- Author: Aamer Hussein
- Publisher: Red River
- ISBN: 9789392494321
Regular price
Rs. 299.00
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This book follows Aamer Hussein’s journey as a writer, through a variety of subjects, styles and timelines. It collects and strings together the joys of such a journey, as also the many losses, sufferings, friendships, travels, conversations, underlined by a constant hopefulness, an abiding inner voice that lives in the moment even as it assimilates the past.
Aamer Hussein moves through the literary cultures of East and West like an undersea river surfacing in unexpected places. The book he slips politely into his pocket when he meets you at a London tube station may be in French, Italian or Urdu. He teaches world literature but his deepest attention often goes to writing by women from the 1930s to the 1970s in any of six languages and from any nation, from India, Pakistan, Indonesia or Thailand, North or South America or anywhere in Europe. The heart of his own writing is the short story but he blurs and fuses genres, criss-crossing lines between memoir and fiction in a lightly worn but radical hybridity which comes from his own life and seems to bear out George Steiner’s thesis in Extraterritorial that the talismanic writer of our era is the one at home in multiple languages and countries. ‘Inevitably,’ says Hussein, ‘the question of form seems to lead the question of roots and origins.’
Aamer Hussein moves through the literary cultures of East and West like an undersea river surfacing in unexpected places. The book he slips politely into his pocket when he meets you at a London tube station may be in French, Italian or Urdu. He teaches world literature but his deepest attention often goes to writing by women from the 1930s to the 1970s in any of six languages and from any nation, from India, Pakistan, Indonesia or Thailand, North or South America or anywhere in Europe. The heart of his own writing is the short story but he blurs and fuses genres, criss-crossing lines between memoir and fiction in a lightly worn but radical hybridity which comes from his own life and seems to bear out George Steiner’s thesis in Extraterritorial that the talismanic writer of our era is the one at home in multiple languages and countries. ‘Inevitably,’ says Hussein, ‘the question of form seems to lead the question of roots and origins.’
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