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'The City: An Anthology of New Indian Writing' is Hammock’s first print anthology, edited by Abhay Puri, bringing together 17 pieces of fiction, essays and translation by contemporary writers including Shruti Sonal, Saee Koranne-Khandekar, Dilsher Dhillon and Prthvir Solanki. Selected from more than 300 submissions, the collection explores everyday urban life in India through housing, climate anxiety, class, caste, gender, ambition, disenchantment and joy.
Mumbai has a way of turning ordinary problems into full-time occupations. Finding a place to rent, getting across town, paying for that place and trying to imagine a future here can all become part of the daily grind. The City: An Anthology of New Indian Writing, edited by writer and editor Abhay Puri, sheds a light on these everyday urban pressures, bringing together 17 pieces of writing — 10 short stories and seven essays — that look at Indian cities through the lives inside them. Selected from more than 300 submissions, the anthology touches upon renting, climate anxiety, class, caste, gender and questions on what progress actually means, alongside the disenchantment, conflict and joy that come with city life.
For Mumbai, Prthvir Solanki’s The Geography of Dreams (or, Fuck The City) takes aim at the city’s long-standing reputation as a place where dreams come true. Solanki, a writer, photographer, documentary filmmaker and journalist, studied English Literature and Anthropology at St Xavier’s College, Mumbai, before completing an MA in Media and Cultural Studies at TISS. His work has appeared across fiction and nonfiction, including Many Last Wishes and A Metro Station on my Maidan, and he has written about the city through questions of development, ambition, work and the people caught up in all of it. His essay in The City brings that experience into a personal, funny and irritated look at Mumbai, asking what remains of the “city of dreams” when ambition starts feeling exhausting.
The anthology also reaches back to an older Bombay through Bhisham Sahni’s Chori, translated by Ankita Marwaha. Sahni, the Hindi writer best known for Tamas, wrote across fiction, theatre and translation, with ordinary lives and larger social upheavals frequently meeting in his work. Alongside Solanki’s contemporary Mumbai, Chori offers a story from another Bombay, giving the anthology two literary glimpses of a city separated by decades. Elsewhere, writers including Shruti Sonal, Saee Koranne-Khandekar and Dilsher Dhillon contribute to a collection that moves across different Indian cities and forms, with short stories, essays and fiction in translation making up its portrait of urban India today.
The City is the first print publication from Hammock, the literary platform Puri founded in 2023 after more than a decade working across advertising and content in New York and Mumbai. Hammock began as an online literary magazine publishing short stories, novel excerpts, personal essays, cultural writing and recommendations, with a focus on contemporary writing from South Asia and the voices that can struggle to find space elsewhere. Puri has worked as a copywriter, screenwriter and editor, was selected as a South Asia Speaks Fellow in Fiction in 2022. With The City, his publishing project moves onto paper, gathering writers who approach Indian cities through rent, inequality, changing climates, ambition, frustration and the small pleasures that are granted to its residents.
