A Kitchen in the Corner of the House

AMBAI

sept 2019 · Archipelago

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A Kitchen in the Corner of the House collects twenty-five gem-like stories on motherhood, sexuality, and the body from the innovative and perceptive Tamil writer Ambai.

In A Kitchen in the Corner of the House, Ambai's narrators are daring and courageous, stretching and reinventing their homes, marriages, and worlds. With each story, her expansive voice confronts the construction of gender in Tamil literature. Piecing together letters, journal entries, and notes, Ambai weaves themes of both self-liberation and confinement into her writing. Her transfixing stories often meditate on motherhood, sexuality, and the liberating, and at times inhibiting, contours of the body.

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C.S. Lakshmi, writing under the pseudonym of Ambai, is a feminist Tamil writer. She was born in 1944 in Tamil Nadu, and grew up in Bangalore and Mumbai. Her works include In a Forest, A Deer, Fish in a Dwindling Lake, A Meeting on the Andheri Overbridge, The Purple Sea, and A Night with a Black Spider. Her short stories portray the reality of women's lives, communicating their silence through words. She has worked on research projects such as: The Face Behind the Mask: Women in Tamil Literature. In 1988, Lakshmi founded SPARROW (Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women) a non-governmental organization for documenting and archiving the work of female writers and artists. About the translator: Lakshmi Holmström translated short stories, novels, and poetry by the major contemporary writers in Tamil. Her most recent books are Fish in a Dwindling Lake by Ambai (2012); A Second Sunrise, poems by Cheran; Wild Girls, Wicked Words, a translation of poems by four Tamil women (2012). In 2007 she shared the Crossword-Hutch Award for her translation of Ambai's short stories, In a Forest, a Deer; and she received the Iyal Award from the Tamil Literary Garden, Canada, in 2008.