Sample Short Stories For Childhood

Gripping short stories

Gripping short stories

By Dr Amjad Parvez

Pop Kahaniyan

By Maqsood Ellahi Sheikh

Ali Sufian Afaqi, Lahore; Pp 132; Rs 180

The domain of ‘Pop Kahaniyan’ (Pop stories) has been introduced by Maqsood Ellahi Sheikh, a short storywriter and editor of UK based literary journal ‘Makhzan’. Some may term it as a mini Afsana (short story) or Afsancha (short story type) but the name of this field of literature suggests it be influenced by Western based Pop culture. The publisher of the book titled ‘Pop Kahaniyan’ and a journalist, storywriter cum filmmaker; Ali Sufian Afaqi’s impressions are quite interesting. He says that the shortest of the stories he had heard in his childhood were two; the first that a fellow passenger while traveling in a train asks the other passenger whether he believed in ghosts. The other person answers in negative and then vanishes from the scene. The other story is about a couple sitting in a bench at a beautiful scenic spot. The boy proposes. The girl refuses. Then they live happily ever after.

Now, brevity as per this reviewer’s comprehension is the only answer to why this domain of Pop stories has been launched. Perhaps because the people do not have time for reading novels, short stories etc. (though there is still a majority in the West who still prefer to do so despite the computer, Internet and media age). In our part of the world the art of reading is also diminishing but still one finds a sizeable crowd on Book Fairs. Anyhow Maqsood Ellahi Sheikh, since has spent his lifetime in Bradford, his stories are based on the psyche, life and experiences of immigrants from South Asia in Britain’s background.

In a Pop story titled ‘Jor Bejor’ (matched and unmatched), people start talking about of lesser age of the widow Naseeb Jehan when her elderly husband Qazi Jamshed dies of cardiac arrest. It had been known to all that Jamshed was engaged to some other girl for five years but the engagement broke. So, there was no harm that fifteen years old Naseeb was married to Jamshed, much elder to her. However no offshoot was in the offing for a long time out of this wedlock. Another couple Naseemey and Abdus Samad returned from abroad in the same locality where Jamshed had lived. Naseemey was reported to have maintained her figure, fitness and beauty, perhaps of her stay in the West. At that time, Jamshed was alive.

Richard Wright - Black History Biographies | The Black Heritage ...

1908-1960  Richard Nathaniel Wright, one of America’s great literary figures, was also one of the first African American writers to receive international fame and notoriety. He was a prolific writer who used stunning prose to address themes of race, gender, politics, and the struggle for individual freedom. Wright was the first black author to have a best-selling novel.

Wright was born on September 4, 1908, on a cotton plantation near Natchez, Mississippi. His grandparents had been slaves, and he was the elder of two sons born to Nathaniel Wright, an illiterate sharecropper, and Ella Wilson, an educated schoolteacher. Wright’s younger brother, Leon Alan, was born in 1910. Their childhood was tumultuous and difficult. The family faced dire economic hardship in the racially segregated rural south, and when Wright was age six, his father abandoned them. The two boys were briefly remanded to an orphanage, and later housed with their abusive grandparents after their mother was paralyzed by a stroke when Wright was 10 years old.

One of Wright’s earliest and most influential memories, described in Black Boy, was an accident that occurred at his grandparents’ house. He was just a young boy, and after tossing some broom bristles into the fireplace, curtains nearby caught fire and the entire house burned to the ground. Wright was beaten unconscious by his mother for this unintentional act. He lost innocence that day, through violence and through loss of trust in his mother as a sympathetic and nurturing figure. It precipitated Wright’s lifelong quest for identity through the strength of the individual, a major theme in his writings.

Another tragic milestone in Wright’s life occurred in 1917, at age eight. His mother had taken her two sons to live with an aunt and uncle, Maggie and Silas Hopkins. For the first time, the boys were well fed, and had found a father figure in their uncle, a successful business owner who supplied the black community in Elaine, Arkansas, with building materials. When Silas was shot and lynched by a white man who went unpunished, Wright was overwhelmed by the injustice and complexity of human nature.

He found little solace in moving to live with his grandparents, now in Jackson, Mississippi, who still blamed Wright for the accidental fire that had burned down their house. While he was able to attend school, his grandparents routinely beat Wright and his brother, and indoctrinated them with their devout and fiery brand of religion. He survived by focusing on school, where he excelled. In 1925, Wright was valedictorian of his graduating class, and published his first story in the Southern Register. That same year, he struck out on his own for Memphis, Tennessee. Years later, in 1945, Wright wrote of his youth: “My days and nights were one long, quiet, continuously contained dream of terror, tension, and anxiety.

Children of Job, American second-generation witnesses to the Holocaust

The Facts on File companion to the American short story

International companion encyclopedia of children's literature

The review of reviews

Atlantic monthly