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Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Reviews of Love Stories # 1 to 14

"Tantalisingly subtitled and numbered 1 to 14, yet arranged haphazardly—like random numbers in a slot machine—these stories tell of the chanciness of love, the odds you may or may not bet on.... The tonic to your seasonal cheer" - Outlook.

"Zaidi doesn’t distort or overly complicate her subjects, merely studies their symptoms and the effect of their desires on their actions. Neither indulgent nor critical, Zaidi offers, if not liberation, at least the comfort of sharing a fraught human emotion." - Time Out.

"So warm and attentive is the writing in Annie Zaidi's new short-story collection that it comes as a little shock when you think about what some of her characters are really going through. This book's tone is consistently hushed, reflective, shorn of hysteria — even in a description of two people arguing, with a lifetime of companionship on the line — but beneath its still surfaces there is much emotional turbulence." - Jai Arjun Singh in the Sunday Guardian.

"Zaidi rolls up her sleeves and digs in to the emotional core of her protagonists, with nary a nod to their externalities... There’s no excavation that the reader needs to perform to get to the emotional core of the characters, they’re stripped of flesh and laid bare for all to see. But in this book it works wonderfully, because Zaidi tells us such wonderful things... She has an eye for detail that would make a falcon blush... once she has you by those heartstrings, she rarely lets go." - Mid-Day

"None of the love stories in this collection by Annie Zaidi are comforting, happy-ever-afters – which is a good thing. Nothing’s tied in a bow and presented to the reader, nothing could present a danger to your teeth or sugar levels. Cloying, bland or limp, these are not." - Reader review 2 on Good Reads.

"Annie’s stories are not teen romances that are aspirational and otherworldly, but they open up small little worlds that are hidden to us and makes us wonder about the stories of people who we meet in our everyday life. Her stories are filled with real people." - Reader review 1 on Good Reads. 


"In the 14 stories, Zaidi explores every aspect of this ‘not so brief’ madness through situations that could belong to any part of the country. All the stories are characterized by a deep sense of compassion, though their titles – hashtags, aka and all – offset the compassion with a modern quirkiness." - Women's Web

"Twisted but alluring" - Indian Express

"It’s about love and its manifestation in its platonic, obsessive, unrequited, unattainable, complicated, and unpredictable forms... Zaidi manages to weave every nuance of this overwhelming emotion into stories that one can relate to. What sets the book apart is that through the fourteen stories, Zaidi covers the entire social spectrum and the complexities that accompany love in a conventional society." - Blog Review 1

More links:

http://mynascence.wordpress.com/2012/12/15/annie-zaidi-and-complicated-love/

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/twisted-tales-of-love/1047460/0

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