The Greatest Telugu Stories Ever Told spans almost a century of work by some of the finest writers of short fiction in the language.
The storytellers included in the anthology range from literary masters such as Chalam, Kanuparthi Varalakshmamma, and Kodavatiganti Kutumba Rao to contemporary writers like Mohammed Khadeer Babu, Jajula Gowri, and Vempalle Shareef.
The tales found in this collection weave a rich tapestry of Telugu experiences. Illindala Saraswati Devi’s ‘Bad Times’ discusses the downturn in Muslim fortunes after the integration of the nizam’s state with the Indian union. Boya Jangaiah’s ‘The Eclipse’ chronicles the aching memories that besiege a Dalit poet when he makes a brief stop at his village. Bandi Narayanaswami’s ‘Water’ dramatizes the acute shortage of water in the Rayalaseema region and its exacerbation by political rivalries. Kavana Sarma’s ‘House Number’ gently mocks a self-proclaimed math genius and his attempts at memorizing a simple house number. A heartbreaking love story, Vempalli Gangadhar’s ‘Festival of Love’ is a romance imbued with the fragrance of jasmine fields.
Selected and deftly translated by Dasu Krishnamoorty and Tamraparni Dasu, these and the other stories in this collection offer a window into how the Telugu people see the world and their place in it.
Dasu Krishnamoorty is an anthologist, translator, and storyteller based in New Jersey. He was educated at Andhra University, the University of Bombay (LLB), and Osmania University (Journalism), before becoming an influential Indian print media journalist. He has worked in an editorial capacity at the Indian Express, Times of India, and Patriot. He was a senior political commentator with All India Radio and taught mass communications at Osmania University, the Indian Institute of Mass Communications in New Delhi, and the University of Hyderabad. His works include 1947 Santoshabad Passenger and Other
Stories and The Seaside Bride and Other Stories.
Tamraparni Dasu, along with her father, Dasu Krishnamoorty, founded the literary non-profit organization IndiaWrites Publishers Inc. to support high quality translation and the dissemination of short fiction written in Indian languages. The non-profit supported Literary Voices of India (2006–2012), an online magazine, culminating in the anthology 1947 Santoshabad Passenger and Other Stories. Dasu publishes genre fiction under the name T. Dasu. Her works include Spy, Interrupted: The Waiting Wife and Spy, Interrupted: The Perfect Candidate. She has a PhD in Statistics from the University of Rochester
and specializes in computational statistics, machine learning, data quality, and stream analytics. She was a Lead Inventive Scientist at AT&T and has numerous patents and academic publications to her credit.