VERSIONS OF TRUTH URDU SHORT STORIES FROM PAKISTAN KHALID HASAN FARUQ HASSAN (Eds.) 274pp RS 125 ISBN 0-7069-S128-3 Versions of Truth, by far the most ambitious collection of Urdu short stories to|have appeared in English, represents fifteen major writers from Pakistan. Chronologically, the period covered extends from the 1930s, when the Progressive Writers Movement was initiated in Lahore and Lucknow, to the present. Influenced profoundly by the major revolutionary and freedom movements of the time, the writers reflected this mood through their choice and treatment of subject, and their preoccupation with a literature of intense social commitment. The selection presented here includes four stories by the doyen of this group, Saadat Hasan Manto, and ranges in style and substance from his powerful evocation of the critical and bloody time of Independence, to Mohammad Askari's masterly handling of the short story, Ghulam Abbas* Flaubertian use of language and impeccable sense of timing, and Mohammad Umar Memon's Joycean treatment of unmistakably subcontinental situations. In between are stories that experiment with the medieval mystic mode, use archetypal symbols or, quite simply, trace their descent in a direct line from Premchand. Complex and rich in its fare, this unique collection expresses the genius and sensibility of a people while, true to our time, presenting an aesthetic of suffering. Vikas (New Delhi) 128