IN-PERSON | Transnational Literature Series: Kalpana Raina with Shubha Sunder

Join the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith for an in-store event with translator Kalpana Raina to discuss and celebrate the release of For Now, It Is Night: Stories by Hari Krishna Kaul. She will be in conversation with writer Shubha Sunder.

A collection of lively short stories that provide an irreverent examination of exile, drawn from the ever-observant pen of one of Kashmir’s most celebrated writers

Hari Krishna Kaul published most of his work between 1972 and 2000. His short stories, shaped by the social crisis and political instability in Kashmir, explore—with a keen eye for detail, biting wit, and deep empathy—themes of isolation, individual and collective alienation, corruption, and the social mores of a community that experienced a loss of homeland, culture, and language.

In these pages, we will find friends stuck forever in the same class at school while the world changes around them; travelers forced to seek shelter in a battered, windy hostel after a landslide; parents struggling to deal with displacement as they move away from Kashmir with their children, or loneliness as their children leave in search of better prospects; the cabin fever of living through a curfew . . .

Brilliantly translated in a unique collaborative project by Kalpana Raina, Tanveer Ajsi, Gowhar Fazili, and Gowhar Yaquoob, For Now, It Is Night brings a comprehensive selection of Kaul’s stories to English readers for the first time.

Kalpana Raina, born in Kashmir, is a senior executive, board director, and adviser in both corporate and not-for-profit sectors. Her writing has been published in Lit Hub and Words Without Borders. She lives in New York.

Moderator Shubha Sunder’s debut short story collection, Boomtown Girl, won the 2021 St. Lawrence Book Award. Her debut novel, Optional Practical Training, will be published in 2025 by Graywolf Press. Shubha’s stories and essays have appeared in places like Catapult, The Common, New Letters, Crazyhorse, and Narrative Magazine, and received notable mentions in Best American Short Stories. Her fiction has been shortlisted for the Flannery O’Connor Short Story Award, the Hudson Prize, and the New American Press Fiction Prize. She is a 2020 recipient of the City of Boston Artist Fellowship Award and a 2016 recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship.