Archana Verma

Hindi Tales of Mystery and Imagination Volume 1 Archana Verma

A loner finds solace near a cremation ground. A professor of fiction concocts anecdotes in her classes. A prisoner falls in love with a woman whom he can only look at through a hole in a wall. A film director enters a time machine that is in beta version. A hunted man goes to a temple to seek peace and comes out with his shirt drenched in blood. A god-man gives audience from a mansion that changes locations. A mother rushing to reach her ailing son runs into Satan in a train coach...



In these pages, you will find stories with a voice that is unique. These are stories imagined by present-day Hindi writers. Hindi and its dialects are understood by about half a billion people mainly in the north and central parts of India, but modern Hindi literature remains largely ignored in the rest of the world.



In 2015, Cernunnos Books and Kathadesh magazine launched the first Hindi Tales of Mystery and Imagination contest. The winning stories were published in Hindi in Kathadesh. This collection brings these stories together for the first time in English. Cernunnos Books proudly presents the first fruit of a rare project that combines new writing and translation.