A Kitchen in the Corner of the House

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

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, in turn inhibiting, contours of the body.

In one story, a young girl is frozen in terror, waiting to tell mother that she’s just gotten her period. She thinks, “I need my mother. My heart yearns for her….” Fueled by such longing, each of Ambai’s characters seek a freer form of language and expression in Tamil. In another, a yellow fish flits into the ocean with an arrogant snort – at one moment on the brink of death and in the next, freely merging with the ocean’s blue-grey depths.