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ISSUE 14: CONTRIBUTORS
Derek Anderson, Christian Monson, Daniel McKay, Elijah Petty, Amy Collini, J. Check, Chloé Agar, S. Qiouyi Lu, Kate Shannon, Archita Mittra, Rachel Rodman, Josh Pearce, Jennifer Crow, Pia Bhatia, Prashanth Gopalan & Anthony Perconti
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Blue-Shifted Futures by Vajra Chandrasekera
Editor's Note: "Blue-Shifted Futures" has been withdrawn from Mithila Review by the author.
Indra Das: “The artist’s job is to provide the seed for an infinite tree of branching meanings, all flowering inside the hive mind of a collective human audience.”
Indra Das in conversation with Salik Shah: What do you prefer: Kolkata or Calcutta? I have no preference. They’re ultimately not that different, and I kind of like that the city has two names; one for the past and one for the present. I tend to use Kolkata because...
The Adventure by Jayant Vishnu Narlikar
Date : July 19, 1986. Time: 7.36 p.m. That was when it happened. At that precise moment of time, Professor Gangadharpant Gaitonde collided with a truck and apparently vanished into thin air. But let us begin the story at the beginning. Professor Gaitonde was an...
Madhesh Through Magic Mirror: History and the Quest for ‘Self’ by Bhushita Vasistha
The Edibles and The Inedibles I do not remember how Mother looked when she came to Saptari with a child cradled in her arms. The journey from Kathmandu, where she was trying to complete her Bachelor in Arts with no small difficulties, must have been tiresome. I was...
Resurrection Points by Usman T. Malik
I was thirteen when I dissected my first corpse. It was a fetid, soggy teenager Baba dragged home from Clifton Beach and threw in the shed. The ceiling leaked in places, so he told me to drape the dead boy with tarpaulin so the monsoon water wouldn't get at him. When...
Braveheart’s Homecoming by Dilman Dila
The flight over the jungle dragged up memories he thought were buried forever, mostly of coldness, of his fingers getting so numb that he could not feel them, and of his dead brother. The memory sent a jolt through his skull, as if a bullet had gone in between his...
Ken Liu: “History is both the most human of sciences and the most scientific of stories”
A lawyer and programmer by profession, Ken Liu’s fiction has appeared in F&SF, Asimov’s, Analog, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and Clarkesworld, among other places, and won the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards. He is also a frequent translator of fiction...
Wolfish Woman by Ajapa Sharma
I. Entering Their Terrain Sometimes I walk licking my wounds into the territories of other women wolves. They greet me with a friendly grin as human wolves are trained to do but inside I know they are growling trying to shoo me away. As I amble on into their...
Two Poems by Shikha Malaviya
Love Letters Shikha Malaviya After Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s Engraving of a Bison on Stone The letters will be brief and colorful and leave a residue of spilt oil and blood. They will be an enduring sort, of wars that sand blew over, turning casualties into rock...
Shadowskin by Shveta Thakrar
Shadowskin Shveta Thakrar I. Once upon a time There was a girl With all a monarch’s markers: Flowing hair like flax In search of a spinning wheel, Eyes of afternoon sky, Skin like sweetest cream The kind you eat with peaches (Mmm, said the wolf, tastes like candy!)...
Art With Olivia Fraser
In 1989, when Olivia Fraser moved to Delhi with her then fiancée and now husband Willam Darlymple, it was evident that all things in the universe were ultimately connected. Her kinsmen, William and James Baillie Fraser, famous Company School art commissioners who had...
The Quest for Dignity and Justice in Speculative Fiction
For the past few months, we have been actively looking for stories and submissions for a proposed SF anthology. The theme for the project is the quest for dignity and justice from the margins of society. In this inaugural web issue of Mithila Review, we are publishing...
Two Poems by Rohan Chhetri
History of Justice Rohan Chhetri Some kids from the neighbourhood are bursting firecrackers by the side of our compound wall. Grandmother is screaming at them. Mother smiles knowing they won’t listen. Grandfather once stayed up late in the night at the window of the...
Two Poems by Shweta Narayan
Triumph VIII: Shakti Shweta Narayan Our glare turns men to stone, to ash. We make the flesh of butchered sons our husbands' feast, devour the warring Asuras, and slake our thirst on their hot blood. There is no beast we can't command: we know them. So we dance on...
Celebrating the Language of the Margin
Mithila, the geographical space which spills across the messy border between Nepal and North India in Bihar, witnessed intense political churnings from mid 2015 to early 2016. On the Nepali side of the border, people of the plains in the small country sprung up in...