Writer's name: Sushma Joshi
Title of work: A Bowl of Zuppa
Genre: short story
Name of magazine/journal: El Ghibli
Issue: Jun 2010
Author's bio: Sushma Joshi is a Nepali writer and filmmaker based in Kathmandu, Nepal. End of the World, her book of short stories, was long-listed for the Frank O' Connor International Short Story Award in 2009. She co-edited New Nepal, New Voices (Rupa 2008). Art Matters, a book of art essays, was supported by the Alliance Francaise De Katmandou. Inspired by Nepali history and contemporary politics, her fiction and reportage deal with issues of social inequality, environment and gender.
Excerpt:
"And in that red mirror of Rome, I finally saw it—the world coming to an end. The city was in an orgy of shopping during Christmas. People were in a frenzy as they browsed through the stalls—the goods were so plentiful I wondered if all the factories of China had been looted to stock the shops of Italy. How many thousands of bonded and unpaid Chinese prisoners had worked day and night to duplicate the arts of Italy until every single sacred object could be bought for under ten euros in a street stall? Red lingerie was in my face wherever I looked. So was Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, advertising Mr. and Mrs. Smith. There was unseasonal rain, so much that people were talking about old sites getting flooded and washed away by the rain. Global warming or cycles of weather changes that has occurred through millennia? The Romans I talked to preferred to think it was a geological occurrence, a cycle of weather patterns that had happened again and again over millennia. The activities of people, they said firmly, had no hand in the weather changes. The world, it was clear, was coming to an apocalyptic end. And all people could think to do was shop. And go to the movies. The sound of the fiddle was loud, but I could still hear the whole world burning."
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Title of work: A Bowl of Zuppa
Genre: short story
Name of magazine/journal: El Ghibli
Issue: Jun 2010
Author's bio: Sushma Joshi is a Nepali writer and filmmaker based in Kathmandu, Nepal. End of the World, her book of short stories, was long-listed for the Frank O' Connor International Short Story Award in 2009. She co-edited New Nepal, New Voices (Rupa 2008). Art Matters, a book of art essays, was supported by the Alliance Francaise De Katmandou. Inspired by Nepali history and contemporary politics, her fiction and reportage deal with issues of social inequality, environment and gender.
Excerpt:
"And in that red mirror of Rome, I finally saw it—the world coming to an end. The city was in an orgy of shopping during Christmas. People were in a frenzy as they browsed through the stalls—the goods were so plentiful I wondered if all the factories of China had been looted to stock the shops of Italy. How many thousands of bonded and unpaid Chinese prisoners had worked day and night to duplicate the arts of Italy until every single sacred object could be bought for under ten euros in a street stall? Red lingerie was in my face wherever I looked. So was Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, advertising Mr. and Mrs. Smith. There was unseasonal rain, so much that people were talking about old sites getting flooded and washed away by the rain. Global warming or cycles of weather changes that has occurred through millennia? The Romans I talked to preferred to think it was a geological occurrence, a cycle of weather patterns that had happened again and again over millennia. The activities of people, they said firmly, had no hand in the weather changes. The world, it was clear, was coming to an apocalyptic end. And all people could think to do was shop. And go to the movies. The sound of the fiddle was loud, but I could still hear the whole world burning."
(Let us know of your publication or forthcoming publication so we can publicize it on the site. Please submit a write-up with information found above plus the link where your work appears in; or you may check the Good Reads Elsewhere guidelines found under the "Submissions" link.)
Continue reading here.
