- Hardcover: 256 pages
- Publisher: Key Porter Books; 1 edition (Jan 5 2008)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1552639592
- ISBN-13: 978-1552639597
- Product Dimensions: 21.8 x 15 x 2 cm
- Shipping Weight: 454 g
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #547,311 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Toronto Star
"Saidullah's stories are clearly the work of a painstaking and meticulous craftsperson. This is a skilled literary engineer."
The Globe and Mail
"Saidullah's book is . . . studded with powerful images."
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
A stunning new collection,
By
This review is from: Happiness and Other Disorders: Short Stories (Hardcover)
Happiness and other Disorders is a stunning collection of stories by Ahmad Saidullah, a mature and enormously talented new writer. Saidullah's stories are literary gems, cleverly crafted, suffused with humour and wit and driven by compelling narrative. Some of the characters in the central story, Fifteen Sketeches of Rumi, reappear, unifying the book and suggesting the nucleus of a novel. Whether dialogue or description, Saidullah writes with the confidence of the master, gorgeously, flawlessly, without an extraneous word.
(Slight Spoiler Warning:) My favorite story, Flight to Egypt, is set in India but could be any place where danger and violence roil beneath the surface of daily life. Saidullah evokes our senses as well as our minds: we tense at the murderous urgency of the assassin's flight; we recoil at his disturbing erotic encounters; we taste the "hope and redemption" of chocolate; and we smell the odour of fear as the doomed protagonist flees to what he cannot escape. Saidullah has an extraordinary range of styles. The student of the short story and the aspiring short story writer will both find Happiness and Other Disorders a fertile field for analysis: effortless shifting between points of view, comedy, tragedy, action and, in the eponymous story Happiness and Other Disorders, a rollicking, seven-page single sentence. Another of my favorites, Vatan and the Cow, conveys the calm fatalism of the dispossessed. "She died one night as they slept together, the old man and his cow. He stayed with his hand on her head for hours lost in thought. He covered the corpse with a gunnysack and started walking without looking back."
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