LAHORE: In a session of the Lahore Literary Festival 2021 on Saturday, a book titled, Midnight Doorways: Fables from Pakistan, was launched.

Author Usman T. Malik in conversation with Snopes reporter Nur Nasreen Ibrahim threw light on different aspects of the book.

Usman, who is a fiction writer from Lahore and has won many international awards for his writings which have been published in different publications, said the title doorways symbolised options and opportunities and his stories dealt with human choices. He had written a lot of dark fiction and now he had come up with a book having fables.

Referring to the second part of the title of the book, he said a lot of people looked at fables as moral allegories. A fable which gives up its moral allegory is not a true fable. A fable is like torch-bearer of history.

To this question that how he put together the collection of stories, he said the connecting thread of all those stories in the book was he himself, because he immenselyenjoyed writing such stories. The books reveal the aesthetics of the author. He said he had written this book to represent a different Pakistan. A haunted Pakistan, a Pakistan which had come out of two-decade long war. These stories look at that haunted Pakistan through a different lens.

The writers which inspired him to write such stories included Nayyer Masoodand Khalida Asghar. He also spoke high of nine artists who did Illustrations of different stories in the book and did a fabulous job.

He said he was working on a novel set in a haunted house of Lahore.

Published in Dawn, February 21st, 2021