Over the past few weeks, we have regularly updated our website with interesting stories, features, essays, and much more. It has been exciting for us – and we hope it has been for you, too.

So, we are taking a moment to look back. This week, we are presenting a curated retrospective of the past weeks: a selection of stories and moments that capture the essence of what we have been working on, while also offering a glimpse of where we’re headed next.

In the 1930s, when Urdu writer Sadat Hasan Manto lived on the chaotic Grant Road of Bombay, he wandered the city quite often, particularly in search of expensive fountain pens. One such purchase — a green-coloured ladies Parker pen — he even gifted to Ismat Chugtai, his long-time friend. Surprisingly though, Manto never used these pens himself for his writing, he always wrote his short stories with a soft pencil. The pencil, he believed, “helped his hand keep pace with his thoughts”.

As we type out this newsletter on a laptop, from our busy office in Bangalore, it is strangely nostalgic to think of the vast and vibrant traditions of writing and storytelling in Indian languages. In many ways, our endeavour at Hyphen is to bring much of this delightful literature – and friendships of the worlds it nurtured – to our readers, in new and interesting ways, while keeping alive the memory of the years gone by.

But isn’t it also time to form memories?

If you’ve been receiving our newsletters and reading all that we have bringing your way, we’d love for you to fill out this short google form. When we say short we mean it — it’s just three questions, and will take you less than five minutes! We’d love to know what you think.

We’ve published a range of writing across our digital platform: from short compilations of little magazines from India, to reflections and provocations that emerge in the process of translation. What we find ourselves drawn to, time and again, is the unusual, the unexplored. If there’s one thing we’ve learnt, it is that there’s much to be gained from working outside the box: embracing extraordinary, evocative, and experimental stories, and work that is formally and stylistically exciting.

As we move forward, we hope you will continue to engage with us, and build a collective space of reading, thinking, and discovery.

Read on to see some of the pieces we published in August. There’s a lot more to explore on our digital platform.

One Post. Many Possibilities

One Post. Many Possibilities