Title: Principles of Prediction
Author: Anushka Jasraj
Publisher: Context Books
ISBN: 978-9389648713
Genre: Literary Fiction, Short Stories
Pages: 192
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5
If you have to read one short-story collection this year (of whatever is left of the year), make it this one. Jasraj’s prose sets you free. Her characters expose their wounds and are proud of them. Her characters love and hate in equal measure. They read Tolstoy and kidnap elephants. They mourn. They celebrate the mundane. Some run away from their husbands, with lion tamers in search of a better life. A storm is coming and there’s inner turmoil, and then the question of sadness.
Anushka Jasraj’s collection of short stories are bewildering, fantastical, ordinary, and always connect with the reader in strange ways. Her writing is as though a hand is reaching out to you and taking you places you’ve only dreamed of. You give in and you’re in for a ride. Her characters tip-toe around life – some waiting for a dead mother’s list to be read, while others are caught between politics and love, with violence always in the distance.
Principles of Prediction is to be savoured at various points of time in the day, with copious amount of cups of tea. There is melancholy tinged with wit. There is the observation of day-to-day coupled living with technicolor dreams. There are men, women, and children caught in relationships that don’t make any sense and here they are, merely living. Read this collection for all of this and more. You won’t regret it.
Of Books and Reading 
Hey! Vivek. Can you do a list of best short story collections from across the world, time and space please?
Sure. Done. Will work on that.