Selected Short Stories (Penguin Classics)

“Error will not go away; logic and reason are slow to penetrate. We cling with both arms to false hopes, refusing to believe the weightiest proofs against it, embracing it with all our strength. In the end it escapes, ripping our veins and draining our heart’s blood; until, regaining consciousness, we rush to fall into snares of delusion again.”

With these words Rabindranath Tagore ends his short story, “The Postmaster.” It is the tale of a postmaster in British India who takes in an orphaned village girl to do his housework for which he pays her with food. The thread of this story, like those running through all of Tagore’s tales, is the small quiet spaces of the heart, where no other human can see and which we ourselves may scarcely comprehend.

Tagore’s Life

Rabindranath Tagore was born in 1861 in Calcutta, when India was part of the British Empire. He died in Calcutta in 1941. During those 80 years, he produced 90 short stories, books of poetry and numerous paintings. Tagore was the first Asian to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, an honor he received in 1913.

Tagore’s Short Stories

Reading a short story by Tagore is a journey into life’s trials and complexities. In “Selected Short Stories,” translated from Tagore’s native Bengali by William Radice, 30 Tagore classics show his compassion and humanity for the lowly and forgotten.

Tagore’s stories do not philosophize or scold. They remind the reader of the frailty and sadness of much of the human condition: A young woman and her family devastated by the debt of an unpaid dowry; a little boy disgraced for playing with his sister on a social holiday; a house servant who’s life is upended by a freak accident; the skeleton in a medical school that once belonged to a young woman with hopes and dreams of her own; an idealistic young man who dreams of changing the world only to look back on his unfulfilled life and cherish one truly meaningful night; an old man living a life of regret because of a terrible mistake.

The tales are not hopeless or morbid. Rather, they remind the reader of our frail natures and of the importance and need for empathy and compassion for our fellow humans. Tagore’s tales do not discuss the grand and famous, but focus on seemingly insignificant people whose hopes and dreams, fears and regrets fill an entire world. His stories ask us to consider how our fellow humans must bear life's burdens-and to show them kindness as they do.

Mesmerizing with his prose, sincere in his humanity, beautiful in his settings, Rabindranath Tagore’s short stories left us an artist’s appeal to understand the yearnings and dreams of the human heart.

Tagore wrote in my mother tongue, so I am well versed with lot of his works since childhood. However, I cannot stop myself everytime I can lay hands to read any of his works. This one is no exception. What was surprising is that apart from Short Stories (30 of them) it also contains selection of letters from Tagore, which is a really good value add. In addition, there is a glossary of translations to English of commonly used "Bengali" terms, which any non-bengali reader will find really helpful. Paperback quality is good. Must read for anyone interested in the works of the great literary genius!!

I needed to read this book for class on short notice, so I downloaded an ebook version to my Kindle. This book lists 16 different editions, so I picked one and downloaded it. Turns out, the one I picked only has two of the five stories I need to read for class. Then I downloaded sample versions of three other *slightly* different digital "versions" of this book to look at the table of contents, and they all had different stories with different translations of the titles - others had a couple of the stories I needed, and one had zero, which makes me wonder how Amazon considers them "editions" of the same book when they are not. I understand this is a taxonomical challenge when it comes to differentiate between translations and different compilations, but I sure do wish Amazon would be forthcoming about the table of contents in books like this and make them clear and searchable.

The book took too long and did not get its use. It was suppose to be for a class and never got it in time.

Great writing and translation, but page numbers are all off, and there are many numbers scattered throughout the text, as if referring to another page number that often doesn't exist.