GALPA : Short Stories by Women from Bangladesh

This vibrant and thought provoking anthology of translated short stories is representative of the variety of issues that women from Bangladesh tackle in their writings. It includes stories about the 1971 War of Liberation, women's 'honour', mother-daughter relationships, the vagaries of marriage and contemporary poltical corruption. Well-establisehd women writers such as Selina Hossain and Nasreen Jahan are represented here, along with emerging writers, the better to evoke the broad range of Bangladeshi women's literary voices. Daring in both form and theme, these stories reveal the exciting transformation that fiction writing is currently experiencing on the contemporary literary scene. Firdous Azim is Professor of English at BRAC University in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She has published widely on literary, cultural and women's issues, both inside and outside the country, including The Colonial Rise of the Novel (1993). She is an active member of Naripokkho, a women's activist group in Bangladesh, and is currently working on a women activists' memoir project. Niaz Zaman is Professor of English, University of Dhaka. Her publications include the prize-wimming study. A Divided Legacy: The Partition in Selected Novels of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh; the novel The Crooked Neem Tree and the short story anthology The Dance and Other Stories. She is currently preparing a second collection of short stories for the press.