Praise for Naiyer Masud
Winner of the Saraswati Samman award
Snake Catcher
Masud’s highly evocative, sensuous stories, often told as remembrances of a long-ago childhood, are unique in contemporary Urdu short story writing. Exhibiting an open-ended quality and a seeming lack of the resolution found in more conventional fiction, they occupy a singular niche in the rapidly evolving, diverse artistic landscape of modern Urdu letters, which has experienced the development of surrealism, Marxism, experimentalism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism in its annals.
—Carlo Coppola, World Literature Today
Masud’s stories articulate a protest that is full of wider social resonances. He combines progressive ideas in a modernist idiom, reflecting on a fragmentation of the self in a vocabulary that suggests a still evolving sensibility.
—Jyoti Nair Belliappa, The Hindu
A triumph of the spare and enigmatic. He has been aptly compared to Kafka, Borges, Poe, Dostoevsky, and others, and one imagines that he wouldn’t object…
—Michelle Reale, India Currents
His stories are not only unlike anything in contemporary Urdu fiction, but in Indian literature on the whole.
—Indiaclub.com
I could not get more pleasure than I do in welcoming Naiyer Masud’s Snake Catcher into the world. This is a definitive volume, spanning his early to latest writings, leaving the reader spellbound by his elliptical and dramatic prose.
—Sara Suleri-Goodyear, Yale University
The most extraordinary fictional voice to have emerged in world literature this decade.
—Amit Chaudhuri
Even shorn of its immense humanity, Masud’s lyricism would dazzle, for he is, without doubt, a poet’s storyteller.
—Agha Shahid Ali