Freshly arrived in 1930s Bombay, Manto saw the city like no one else, an ethnic melting pot that became ever more varied as migrant workers flooded in. It was to be Manto’s favourite city. His edgy, moving stories, often peopled with prostitutes and criminals, remain startling and provocative even a hundred years after his birth – in searching out those forgotten by humanity, Manto wrote about what it means to be human. At his centenary, Bombay Stories brings together Manto’s work from his years in that city for the first time. Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad’s contemporary, nuanced translation captures the idiom and the essence of Urdu’s most celebrated short-story writer’s work. Censored, banned, demonized and ostracized: Saadat Hasan Manto’s short stories were considered obscene and downright dangerous during his lifetime and for years after. They still haven’t lost their power to shock and enthrall.

Ethics of Description: The Anthropological Dispositif and French Modern Travel Writing follows the development of a minor tradition in French literature where metropolitan authors traveling abroad demonstrate their awareness of the ethical conundrums of representing world peoples. During the colonial–modern era, currents of anthropological thought and representational practice are identifiable throughout society, and across literature, the arts, and the sciences. Collectively, they can be theorized as belonging to a dispositif, the anthropological dispositif. The modernization of anthropology serves as an ambivalent interlocutor for the realizations of the writers studied in this book about the difficulties of describing cultural realities that lie largely outside their ken. Anthropology motivates new literary representational strategies that are, alternatively, in keeping with scientific mandates or operate against them. Forty images are analyzed alongside literary works. A postcolonial chapter shows how the ethical awareness of the colonial–modern authors studied have impacted minority self-representation in contemporary France.

Love Songs & Laments was selected by Jenni Russell.

Brooklyn poet Matt Reeck's midwinter, runner-up in Fact-Simile's 2009Equinox Chapbook contest, is a 6-foot-long accordion-folded text (4.25x5 in.) with accompanying magnifying glass. midwinter is bound in hand-stamped bookboard and printed in a limited edition of 50.

Selected Satire: Fifty Years of Ignorance brings together about 20 satire pieces of eminent Hindi writer, Shrilal Shukla. Most noted for his novel Raag Darbari, for which he received the Sahitya Akademi Award, Shukla also wrote several collections of satirical essays and short stories. The pieces in this volume include his socio-political and cultural satires, where he caricaturizes politicians, mocks the bureaucracy (many of whom were his friends), and picks on the so-called developmental schemes of the government. A couple of pieces are also about small town attitudes and pretentions of intellectuals. The overall flavour is of an irreverence to authority and humour drawn from everyday occurrences.

Poets include: Katie Fowley, Jon Curley, Matt Reeck, Alejandra Pizarnik, Dmitry Golynko, Dan Ivec.

The colonial conquests of the European nation-state and the ascendance of science and technology within European society characterize the modern era. Among those French writers who ventured into the non-European world, Eugi ne Fromentin, Victor Segalen, Andri Gide, and Michel Leiris saw how a politics of representation inheres in the literary task of describing the world peoples. In questioning the limits of their worldview and their aesthetic training, as well as the limits of European knowledge, these writers begin to articulate new forms of literary description. In their works, description emerges as a multi-tiered forum of representation in which epistemological and aesthetic thinking conditioned by an ethical principle shapes textual practice. Ethnographic textual production forms the outward limit of what these literary writers consider aesthetic. In their minor tradition, these writers move beyond the picturesque for more ethically minded descriptions of world peoples.