Arthur Mandal
@arthurmandal
Brit/US writer of uncanny fiction. Best Small Fictions 2025. Over 40 stories in The Barcelona Review, LITRO, Southeast Review, The Forge, The Los Angeles Review and others. @nightjarpress Based in Eugene, Oregon (but grew up in UK). www.arthurmandal.com
Finally got my hands on the paper copy of this. I’ll share the full story once the next issue of WITNESS comes out. One of two or three stories I wrote inspired by a trip to India.
Recently I walked through Morecambe, a northern seaside town with a melancholy, faded air: shuttered shops, empty retail spaces, bored kids. My father remembered cafés, Hart’s, the Winter Gardens, a pier. The bay is beautiful; the disinvestment is criminal. Brighton feels like another country.
The ending of one of my favorite Tagore stories, “The Postmaster”: a university-educated postmaster befriends a village girl, then leaves for Calcutta. Its final epiphany mixes Western and Hindu nihilisms without quite belonging to either. William Radice’s translation is superb.
I got into London a couple of days ago and visited Tate Britain. Saw a wonderful Whistler exhibition there and decided to share some of the best pictures.
Wonderful piece this week by Mikki Aronoff. Love the figure of the grandfather never met in this.
A short story of mine, “The Enormous Man”, came out with Quarter(ly) Journal last year. Now that their new issue is out, I feel it’s okay to share it (link to pdf in first comment).
Reading this at the moment. Really enjoying it, exquisitely written. Almost a third of the way through.
I read old LRB/NYRB issues a year or two late. This 2023 Jerome Groopman piece is grim: cancer treatment as lucrative market, with investors drawn to drugs that “don’t work too well” or cure too quickly—so the patient/customer keeps paying. Photos attached; paywalled link in comments.
About 6 months ago I submitted a story to The Masters Review Winter Story Award (a journal I’d never had much luck with), and yesterday I got an email saying it had made it onto the longlist. Not exactly a win, but nice that it got into the last 2 percent of about 2,000 entries.
Photos from last week’s visit to Eh-Dan-Brah (I hope I got that phonetically correct). 2/2
Photos from last week’s visit to Eh-Dan-Brah (I hope I got that phonetically correct). 2/2
I bought the FT’s weekend supplement for the first time today. Glossy pages of watches, luxury pens, designer pullovers and boutique-hotel décor laments. It seems written by people who do not occupy our reality. It’s called HTSI — How To Spend It. I wish I was making all of this up.
Sharing today some poems by Arun Kolatkar, who died over 20 years ago in Maharashtra. A wonderful poet: dry, sceptical, funny, yet oddly accepting about Hindu faith. Famously reclusive too — no lecture circuits or workshops. *Jejuri* is the classic, but there’s much more.
My story “Hour Glass” has just come out in the latest issue of Witness, which foregrounds the theme of double/mirror/twin. Many thanks to the editors for accepting the piece. witness.blackmountaininstitute.org/issues/sprin...
Some amazing work on show at the Green Door Gallery (in Brussels) by my friend Imogen Reid. @imogenreid.bsky.social
A few months ago, my India-set story “Hymn to Sri Devi” appeared in Catamaran. When I first shared it, I hadn’t realized they’d made the full text available as well. Now they have — so here are the pages (link to pdf in first comment). 1/2
Huge congratulations to William Pei Shih @williampeishih.bsky.social (and also the Los Angeles Review) for winning an O. Henry Prize this year. Can’t wait to read the story.
Three years ago I visited Nepal and, with perfect timing, arrived in the middle of a general strike. Kathmandu felt like a quieter India: street-corner temples, peaceful shrine-filled squares, silent rooftop cafés. I spent a week wandering, taking photos, here are some of them. 1/2
I’ve been reading Armenian short stories: a huge 20th-century volume, carefully written, meticulously translated, barely known. This Minas Cheraz story is a dark tale of genocide survival, in which an Armenian woman takes revenge. Astonishing how much of the world’s literature remains untapped.
Six weeks ago I drove through Oman to the Yemen border: ancient history, blue sea, mountains. Two weeks later, US/Israeli strikes hit the region—the town I visited was bombed, the airport I changed at struck by drones. I looked toward “war-torn” Yemen, never expecting war behind me.
One of the funniest satires on the Second Gulf War and the whole US War-On-Terror mindset was David Rees’ Get Your War On (2004), which took generic corporate office illustrations and filled them with obscenely funny commentary. (link to Pdf in first comment).
1/2. Since it is exactly four years since the beginning of Russia’s attack on Ukraine, I’m sharing some photos of one of its most architecturally beautiful cities, Lviv. The photos are from 2019. I have no idea if these buildings are damaged or not.