SOURCE: "The Short Fiction of R. K. Narayan," in The Journal of South Asian Literature, Vol. X, No. 1, Fall, 1974, pp. 113-19.

In this essay, the authors describe Narayan's purely artistic approach to his writing, and compare his style to that of other Indian authors writing in English.

Almost every Indo-Anglian writer of fiction has tried his hand at short stories in addition to novels, and none perhaps quite so successfully as R. K. Narayan. Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao and Narayan form the "Big Three" of Indian English writing. Santha Rama Rau has gone so far as to assert that Narayan is "the best novelist that India has produced and probably among the most entertaining and distinguished of contemporary writers anywhere." Narayan himself records in A Dateless Diary that in America some people place him with Hemingway and Faulkner as one of the three greatest modern writers of...