No substitute for trained, talented editors: David Davidar

The writing is electrifying, there is no denying that. Most of the 40 stories in A Case Of Indian Marvels: Dazzling Stories From The Country’s Finest New Writers, edited by author and publisher David Davidar, are pleasurable and effective—providing glimpses of the people, places and politics of contemporary India. A Case Of Indian Marvels—Dazzling Stories From The Country’s Finest New Writers: Edited by David Davidar, Aleph Book Co., 408 pages, ₹999. As the writers in A Case Of Marvels show, you can go about this in a variety of ways—you can press material unique to us, such as Indian mythology, folklore and historical events, into service to make your fiction distinctive and relevant, or you can write genre-bending stories in which literary devices common to genres like SFF, fables and satire are used to create literature that can’t be stuffed into this or that category. I feel, too, rather counter-intuitively, that while creative writing and thinking are getting shallower and more facile in many ways because of the effects of social media, the short story actually provides an opportunity for talented writers to marry aspects of today’s writing on social media platforms with more classical ways of storytelling to create a new hybrid that’s fast-paced, clever, and yet does not sacrifice depth and insight.