Description

About the book

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.

Early praise for the book

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.’

— Ruth Padel, British poet, novelist and non-fiction author

A stunning collection of elegant, allusive stories that pulses us into the everyday and the ephemeral with precise, heart-breaking lyricism. Straddling fiction, memoir and poetry, each story vibrates with spiritual depth to give us a master at the height of his creative powers.

— Priya Sarukkai Chabria, poet, translator; founding editor, Poetry at Sangam

What is Saved is a token for Hussein’s faithful Indian readers who have for years carried in their hearts the poignant echoes of love, loss and longing that are synonymous with his fiction. Finally, the long wait comes to an end. In this rich and subtle collection, the consummate storyteller from Pakistan adds new notes to his spiritual symphony that are by turns familiar, inventive and riveting.

— Taha Kehar, journalist, literary critic and novelist

I put the British-Pakistani writer Aamer Hussein’s memoir Restless on my bedside. For about a decade or so I’d been asking Aamer whether he would write his memoirs, and now he has done it but, of course, it’s not a conventional memoir but a collection of memoirs, essays, and auto-fictional stories aptly subtitled ‘Instead of an Autobiography’. Like his pointillist short fiction and novels, this is a beautifully distilled work, his early years interspersed with college and university life in London, his writing life, memories of growing up in India, Pakistan and Britain, translations of his Urdu fiction, all mixed up to profound effect.

— Mirza Waheed, novelist

About the author

Born and brought up in Karachi, Aamer Hussein spent 28 formative months in Indore, Gwalior, Bombay, and Ootacamund (where he studied) before moving to England, aged 15, in 1970.  He later took a degree in history, Persian and Urdu from SOAS, and has since divided his time between writing and teaching. Aamer Hussein’s books include the story collections The Blue Direction, Insomnia, 37 Bridges, and Zindagi Se Pehle, two novels, Another Gulmohar Tree and The Cloud Messenger, and a collection of essays on Urdu literature, House of Treasures.

About RED RIVER Story

Edited by Sucharita Dutta-Asane, Red River Story Series is a series of limited edition fiction titles from Red River, a publishing outfit based in Delhi dedicated to publishing poetry in English and English translation. Established in 2017, Red River is known for its discerning selection of titles and experimental design. Red River is managed solely by poet, writer and translator Dibyajyoti Sarma, with the help of his friends and colleagues, because for everyone involved, Red River is not just a business, but a passion — an abiding love for poetry. This passion for poetry keeps Red River going, and thanks to the discerning readers of poetry in India and abroad, over the years, it has built a reputation as a niche publisher of poetry.

RED RIVER Story hopes to convey stories from the hinterland and the heartland, from metros and larger towns of the subcontinent — stories that are submerged in the rush of those that are more popular, more immediately acceptable, recognisable.

About the Editor

Sucharita Dutta-Asane is an award-winning writer and independent book editor based in Pune. Her short story collection, Cast Out and Other Stories, was published by Dhauli Books in 2018. It was among Amazon’s “Best of Summer from India, 2018” and was reviewed widely. It is part of the Bengaluru-based Indian Institute of Human Settlements’ (IIHS) library selection. The titular story of Sucharita’s collection is the subject of two international research papers around Gender Politics and Postcolonial Representations of Menstruation. Sucharita is the recipient of the international Dastaan Award and the Oxford Bookstores debuting writers’ (second place) award. Her fiction and reviews have appeared in various literary journals and anthologies. As independent editor she has worked with publishing houses, literary agencies as well as individual authors. From September 2017 to March 2019, she edited the online literary magazine Kitaab, published from Singapore. At present she edits fiction for the Bangalore Review, and teaches a postgraduate course in Writing and Editing at Symbiosis College of Arts and Commerce, Pune.