Saadat Hasan Manto wrote more than twenty collections of short
stories, five radio dramas, three essay collections, one novel, and
a handful of film scripts. A Muslim living in Bombay at the time of
the India-Pakistan Partition, Manto was forced to migrate with his
family to Lahore, where he wrote his most wrenching Partition
stories. When asked why he sought to humanize the grit of Bombay
and the upheaval of Partition, Manto retorted, "If you cannot bear
my stories, it is because we live in unbearable times."
Born in Kashmir, journalist, author, and translator Khalid Hasan is
best remembered for his translations of the poetry of Faiz Ahmad
Faiz and Saadat Hasan Manto's short fiction.
Muhammad Umar Memon was a critic, short story writer, and
translator. He edited The Annual of Urdu Studies at the University
of Wisconsin.
"Saadat Hasan Manto has a good claim to be considered the greatest
South Asian writer of the 20th century. In his work, written in
Urdu, he incarnated the exuberance, the madness, the alcoholic
delirium of his time, when the country he loved cleaved into two
and set upon each other"
--The New York Times
"An endlessly fertile storyteller, Manto charmed even his accusers
. . . Many of his stories drench the murderous absurdities of
intercommunal strife in bitter irony . . . His empathy, obliquity
and narrative economy invite comparisons with Chekhov. These
readable, idiomatic translations have all the agile swiftness and
understated poignancy that parallel suggests."
--Boyd Tonkin, Wall Street Journal
"The Dog of Tithwal brings the streets of Bombay to life."
--Tammy Tarng, The New York Times
"Few fiction writers have captured the trauma of India’s partition
as powerfully as Saadat Hasan Manto . . . Manto writes boldly
yet concisely, as seen in these crisp translations, and his ability
to create vivid characters is matched by a knack for building
cinematic momentum . . . [a] splendid collection."
--Murali Kamma, The New York Journal of Books
"Manto, widely regarded as the foremost Urdu short story writer of
the 20th century, writes tales of brutality, possession, and
innocence. These translations of his work by Hasan and Memon
illustrate the writer’s ability to regard everyone—crooks, the
upper class, politicians, soldiers, housewives, and
prostitutes—with an eye trained on humanity . . . A substantial
collection from an important writer."
--Kirkus Reviews, starred review
"A substantial, posthumously published collection of stories from a
celebrated Urdu writer."
--Laurie Muchnick
"This sardonic collection from Manto . . . reflects the ruptures in
India during the Partition . . . Throughout, the author’s clever
use of irony and dark humor speaks truth to power and to the
characters’ flimsy received notions. Manto’s stories succeed as
surprising reflections on the human condition."
--Publishers Weekly
"In the era of the Indian independence movement and the murderous
and terrifying sectarian conflicts that led to the Partition of the
Subcontinent into India and Pakistan, two major figures retained
their moral balance, transcended their circumstances, and
illuminated their world. One was Gandhi, a politician and
maybe a saint. The other was Saadat Hasan Manto, an Urdu
short-story writer who was anything but a saint."
-- Vijay Seshadri, from the introduction
"Manto's irony and humanity raise him on par with Gogol."
--Anita Desai
"...visionary. A writer of special interest for anyone who cares
about Pakistan, where so many forms of random-seeming violence
crowd the news."
--Ali Sethi, The New Yorker
"It feels both astonishing and inspiring that such a modern writer
was alive at the very birth of Pakistan."
--Sarfraz Manzoor, The Guardian
"The most extraordinary feature of Manto's writing is that, for all
his feeling, he never judges. Instead, he urges us to try to
understand what is going on in the minds of all his characters, the
murderers as well as the murdered..."
--William Dalrymple, The New Yorker
"An errant genius."
--The Hindu
"Manto painted the women of Bombay in a way that few South Asian
writers have been able to since."
--PopMatters
"I would travel anywhere with Manto. . . . He is magnificently
immortal."
--Nadeem Aslam, author of Maps for Lost Lovers
"I read him 40 years ago and I meet kids who are reading Manto for
the first time - you can actually see the light in their eyes. You
can see their jaws dropping and they say, 'What is this? Who is
this guy?'"
--Mohammed Hanif in The Guardian
"There is still no literary rival to Manto. . . . [And] as
communalism, religious intolerance and enmity between India and
Pakistan continue to grow, his stories are still highly
relevant."
--The Independent
“Manto makes us care about all the victims, and about the killers
as well as the killed – it is only by caring, by empathizing
with them, that we can learn to overcome our prejudices and to
sublimate our desire for revenge. Reading these stories with an
open heart, we are enabled to transcend our political biases –
which is perhaps the most radical stage of political development.”
--Daniyal Mueenuddin
"Manto frequently expands his exploration of power to an
international level, showing how the wishes and desires of
individuals are crushed by the unrelenting press of history and the
inner conflict induced by the need to project a religious or
cultural identity. These are plainly written but powerful stories,
which often lead us to uncomfortable and uncertain
realisations."
--Declan O'Driscoll, The Irish Times
"Manto’s writing recalls that of Joseph Roth, whose portraits of
Germany’s interwar underclass anticipated the madness to come more
fully and accurately than any sociological study . . . Manto
skillfully portrays what happens when people lack control over
their fates, when the earth shakes and smoke rises, when life
becomes easily bought and more easily discarded."
--Brian O'Neill, Necessary Fiction
"The tales in this volume are addictive, excellent portraits of a
place and a time."
--Ananya Bhattacharyya, Washington Independent Review of Books
"Manto is an outlier, a freakish occurrence at a freakish time in
South Asia. At the same time, this iconic enfant terrible is
ageless because the world from which alcohol was for him the only
escape . . . is still intact. In all his photographs, he looks
absurdly boyish, his large eyes always wide open as if missing
nothing, but incredulous at what he was seeing."
--Mukund Belliappa, Full Stop
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