Rustic Tales

About the Book Rustic Tales is an interesting collection of 46 tales dealing with variety of themes. Besides offering simple moral lessons, this collection also critiques caste, exposes greed and hypocrisy and underscores communitarian feeling highlighting how the divine and the mundane co-exist in an amusing manner in the folk-cultural environment. Ranchan's inimitable tale-telling is characterized by irony, wit, satire, light-hearted banter and folk-wisdom. Through Rustic Tales, Ranchan has created a space where characters from cross-sections of society interact and intermingle lending meaning via adding spice to life. About the Author Som Ranchan is an important signature in Indian writing in English. Primarily known for his enormous poetic output. Ranchan has also written a novel, short stories, folk ballads and folktales besides writing books on literary criticism, psychology, social satire, depth psychology, mythology and politics. He has more than eighty books to his credit. Ranchan's major publications in poetry include Me and Columbia, Christ and i, Mother Sharda and i, Soul-Making with Sri Aurobindo, Manjushri, Dalai Lama, Padam Sambhava, She, Anteros, Retrospections, The Splintered Mirror, Love Poems and several others. Ranchan also wrote a novel, Passage to Punjab, three collections of short stories and more than a dozen critical books alongside writing Folk-Tales of Himachal and a folk ballad on Shirgul Parmar. About the Editor Roshan Lal Sharma is Dean, School of Humanities & Languages and Head, Department of English & european Languages in the Central University of Himachal Pradesh, Dharamshala. He has authored Walt Whitman and Shorter Fiction of Raja Rao and has co-authored Som P. Ranchan: Dialogue Epic in Indian English Poetry in 2012. He has also translated Ranchan's Shirgul Parmar into Hindi.