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Distributed for Athabasca University Press

Grieving for Pigeons, Revised Edition

Twelve Stories of Lahore

Translated by Anne Murphy
An English translation of a collection of short stories that represents everyday life in the Punjab. 

In this poignant and meditative collection of short stories, Zubair Ahmad captures the lives and experiences of the people of the Punjab, a region divided between India and Pakistan. In an intimate narrative style, Ahmad writes a world that hovers between memory and imagination, home and abroad. The narrator follows the pull of his subconscious, shifting between past and present, recalling different eras of Lahore’s neighborhoods and the communities. These stories evoke the complex realities of post-colonial Pakistani Punjab. The contradictions and betrayals of this region’s history reverberate through the stories, evident in the characters, their circumstances, and sometimes their erasure. Skillfully translated from Punjabi by Anne Murphy, this collection is an essential contribution to the wider recognition of the Punjabi language and its literature.

128 pages | 5 x 8 | © 2024

Mingling Voices Series

Fiction


Table of Contents

Introduction / Anne Murphy

Waliullah Is Lost

Bajwa Has Nothing More to Say Now

Dead Man’s Float

Pigeons, Ledges, and Streets

The Beak of the Green Parrot, Submerged in the River

He Has Left, and Won’t Be Back

Sweater

Unstory

The Estranged City

The Silence of Saints

Half Maghar Moon

The Wall of Water

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