A 100-word story.
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Highway
Author: Amita Basu
I'm a writer based in Bangalore, India.
What I Read: Kafka’s Letter to My Father. Finished Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. Judith Guest’s Ordinary People. Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (reread after primary school) & The Poison Belt. Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty. Needed a light read, and I’d never read this. This is super-light, touching when it’s not preachy, not a story […]
Lots of stuff.
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The Why and the How
This magic realist/speculative story explores poverty, motherhood, and the ethics of necessity from the PoV of a street-dwelling mother bitch in India.
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The Why and the How
[Photo credit] Bewildering Stories published “The Why and the How,” a magic realist / speculative short story, in Issue 940 in two parts. Minerva’s pups are three months old, no longer feeding eighteen times a day, but they’re hungry first thing. She feeds the three that remain with her. Then she licks them over, sniffing […]
Voltaire, Hitler. Gladwell, Shakespeare, bipolar disorder, & speculative short fiction.
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School Trip
(Image credit. The photo is neither mine nor of me.) Sledgehammer Lit Mag published my flash story “School Trip” on their wacky and wonderful site. This story about social class and empathy was inspired by a trip to Banerghatta National Park. *** They’re nine-year-olds, too old, so by the time they’re taunting the moon bears […]
Read: Nonfiction & a novel & drama & some short stories.
Wrote & published: mostly short fiction.
Where Mein Kampf is a sprawling, ill-organised rant overflowing with hateful conspiracy theories, Zweites Buch is a succinct, mostly cogent, well-reasoned statement of Adolf Hitler’s foreign policy views. The ongoing German-Italian crisis regarding the South Tyrol has motivated Hitler to critique Germany’s current foreign policy, and develop a suitable alternative. This he does in the context of considering abstractly the proper motives and goals of any nation’s foreign policy. Zweites Buch is an aetiology of politics itself. If Mein Kampf was an endless parade of Hitler’s destructive delusions and obsessions, Zweites Buch is a glimpse into the mind of an astute politician, a committed if misguided patriot, and a man both “logical and fanatical,” as one observer put it. Zweites Buch puts antisemitism and antibolshevism mostly on the backshelf, and articulates the broad points of the policies Hitler was soon to enact. This analysis of problems and potential solutions – of economics, international rivalries and inequities, and fierce competition over limited natural resources – is a unique window into an important mind, and remains relevant in global politics today
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Rush
Black Fork Review Issue 5 published my 2400-word short story “Rush” in Issue #5. I was born, I must’ve been, though who’s got time to be born anymore? My mother was a fast-food-counter clerk and daycare janitor, and a third job too, or maybe that was later, either way she wouldn’t’ve had time to give […]
Amita Basu 