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  • Published: 17 September 2019
  • ISBN: 9781939810441
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 376
  • RRP: $45.00

A Kitchen in the Corner of the House





A Kitchen in the Corner of the House collects twenty-five gem-like stories on motherhood, sexuality, and the body from the innovative and perceptive Tamil writer Ambai.

A Kitchen in the Corner of the House collects twenty-five gem-like stories on motherhood, sexuality, and the body from the innovative and perceptive Tamil writer Ambai.

In A Kitchen in the Corner of the House, Ambai's narrators are daring and courageous, stretching and reinventing their homes, marriages, and worlds. With each story, her expansive voice confronts the construction of gender in Tamil literature. Piecing together letters, journal entries, and notes, Ambai weaves themes of both self-liberation and confinement into her writing. Her transfixing stories often meditate on motherhood, sexuality, and the liberating, and at times inhibiting, contours of the body.

  • Published: 17 September 2019
  • ISBN: 9781939810441
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 376
  • RRP: $45.00

Praise for A Kitchen in the Corner of the House

  • "Ambai's stories explore the nuances of personal relationships, complex networks of emotions, and mingle themselves insightfully." - The Telegraph
  • "Ambai's stories...are boldly experimental, pointing to the real source of the best Indian fiction in the vernacular languages. She makes use of polyphony, fragmentation, and multiple persepctives, and her translator succeeds in capturing her technical virtuosity." - Times Literary Supplement
  • "Ambai brings to bear upon her tales the weight of her knowledge of the mythic, literary, and Puranic...A felicity of language and the easy flow of words make the translation a pleasure to read." - The Hindu
  • "Ambai excels in making physical movements parallel the progression in her stories...Lakshmi Holmstrom has been able to settle down so comfortably with the psyche of Ambai, that her translations of the latter's Tamil writings have the easy flow of the original." - Deccan Herald