A girl swallowed by a tree: Lotha Naga Tales Retold  (English, Paperback, Nzanmongi Jasmine Patton)

This is a marvelously brave book. I know Jasmine has swum against the tide of publishers wanting her to fit her book into their agenda, and her refusal to do so testifies to her faith in her book. This is a book that should be used like a pathfinder for other books on oral narratives. Literature from the Northeast has been suppressed too long by mainstream publishing that requires writers from the region to write within a prescribed box and format. Here is a writer daring to write oral literature her way, retaining the flavor of oral storytelling, including Lotha words that are culturally untranslatable in their original forms, unashamedly using the logic of the oral narrator and taking us back to an age when ‘all animals and insects could talk, and streams could babble, and all creation had the gift of language’. Easterine Kire