From the Editor’s Desk

October started with the delightful news of South Korean writer Hang Kang winning the Nobel prize for literature. It was an announcement that might have taken many by surprise, but was also warmly welcomed. I had read Kang's famous book The Vegetarian, a few years ago, at a time when I was going through a few upheavals myself, and had instinctively turned vegetarian, in a strange effort to what felt like finding peace.

Peace is an odd word to ally with one's food choices you might think, but how our body reacts to the outside world, and and how it intuitively tries to find calm within the chaotic, is perhaps more about being gut friendly than we understand. Seeking peace, and finding the resources to arrive at that peace are both intuitive and informed choices. It is a moving away, that is as inward, as it is outward, especially for a middle class woman, who responds to her emptiness in the most natural way that her mind and body tells her to.

For hundreds of years now people have combated violence, inner turmoil or the tendency to oppose some wrongdoing with either a fast or eating sparsely. Whether this is an Eastern tendency or a global phenomenon is something that might be an interesting study, but the quiet force with which a woman or a group stands up to an entire society and becomes defiant of their own ability to live, and survive, becomes a remarkable phenomenon.

Good literature, whether it is a protest or not, stems from the same need to find one's own truth, a certain search for an illusive beauty, that by its very nature of being so jarring, is both startling and a protest of the deepest kind. This is an internal run, this strange stubbornness and poetic contradiction, to not appear bohemian or mad, but instead make the inward protest so deep, that it begins to speak loudly to those that surround you.

One would imagine that beyond a point all art aims at startling, at pushing boundaries. We give you October, a small, but powerful issue

Maitreyee Bhattacharjee Chowdhury
Managing Editor, The Bangalore Review

Fiction

Drones

He watches it drop silently into the trench between the soldier’s legs. Yuri clenches, as if the grenade has dropped into his own lap. The Russian soldier scrambles to rise up as the grenade explodes. Yuri stubs out his cigarette in

Poetry

Perennial Daughter

My mother’s kitchen counters
are forever scented by lemons she juiced

Fiction

Epitaph

We found a middle-aged couple standing statue-like next to a new grave, a garish sign on the stonework reading Ghulam & Sons. I remember finding that interesting—a Muslim name in a Christian cemetery. Niharika said something about how sad the

Featured Works

Poetry

Two Poems by Noreia Rain

it’s because i have time now, in these stolen hours in which tree shadows stretch across the windows and outside, and the air is just starting to drape itself in cold and to exhale its fog into the golden streetlamp glow.

Non-Fiction

Directions Home

My earliest childhood memory is of the herd of slow-rising hot air balloons over the Rocky Mountains. Every morning, my twin sister, Ava, and I would stand beneath the westward-facing window of our playroom and gaze towards the horizon as the

Fiction

Dragon boy

I get hungry, so I swim close to the surface. When fish are together, turning in tight patterns for no reason other than to be social, it’s called shoaling. Birds I have seen, when I lived on land, do the same

Poetry

Ark

All vessels have names, even a container ship whose utilitarian appearance does not elicit poetry. Ever Given. Blood oranges, mahogany, lemons,

Poetry

What it feels like to wake up and be gay for the first time in your life but also like the way you were supposed to wake up the whole time

There used to be a snag. It was in the chest and like a ponytail caught

Fiction

The Lasts of Her

A high-pitched staccato called out from the street behind, hawking kitchenware. Streets dotted with Durga puja pandals were in various stages of being undone. A few feet away, my mother’s rounded frame bent over a fruit cart, busy trying out little

Poetry

The Tricks Witches Play

You fattened the pigs in your stye with acorns and beech mast, And with a wave of your wand, you transformed them into men.

Non-Fiction

The House Fire

“What?” I stammered, my head foggy from the Nyquil I’d taken a few hours before. The three kids and I had gotten in late, after a hectic week of skiing and the long drive from Colorado to Dallas. Somewhere around Denver,

Poetry

Hyphen Log

question mark-comma-hyphen marks punctuated by division upon division a leaving-behind

Poetry

Fanny Appleton Longfellow Predicts Her own Death

Lo! Were I a woman bottled and kept, written of as battles bloodied and blessed.

The Bangalore Review