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Night Birds and Other Stories
Since the age of 19, Khet Mar has been persecuted by the Burmese government enduring arrests, torture, incarcerations, and threats to her life. She fought back through her writing, political activism, and social work until she was forced to flee the country in 2009. Her novel Night Birds was banned in 1993, her nonfiction piece Life Row blacklisted in 2007. The same year, the government censored several paragraphs of Night Flow, highlighted in this book.
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
124 pages, Paperback
Published October 9, 2014
41 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 15, 2023
Night Birds is an allegory of the imprisonment of people in Burma for whatever reason a person with power could make up. It is a story of two young people imprisoned in separate rooms but able to at least talk about themselves, their lives, and their reasons for being there. It is also the story of losing that connection in a blink of an eye. The book itself was banned by the Burmese government in 1997.
Life on Death Row is a short non-fiction piece that was blacklisted by the government in 2007.
The author, Khet Mar, is a trained chemist who became a journalist in Burma (Myanmar). She was imprisoned and physically punished for her writings, in her attempt to write about the lives of real people in Burma. After escaping she was a writer-in-residence from 2009 to 2012 at the City of Asylum, an organization in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, that provides long-term asylum to writers under threat of severe persecution in their native countries. Sampsonia Way, the publishing arm of the City of Asylum, published this book.
Life on Death Row is a short non-fiction piece that was blacklisted by the government in 2007.
The author, Khet Mar, is a trained chemist who became a journalist in Burma (Myanmar). She was imprisoned and physically punished for her writings, in her attempt to write about the lives of real people in Burma. After escaping she was a writer-in-residence from 2009 to 2012 at the City of Asylum, an organization in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, that provides long-term asylum to writers under threat of severe persecution in their native countries. Sampsonia Way, the publishing arm of the City of Asylum, published this book.
May 2, 2020
Night birds, the novella that anchors this book, is captivating and one worth not only reading but rereading. It is of its moment, of our moment, and timeless all at once. The short non-fiction pieces are also good and provide helpful context for Khet Mar as a person and writer. I read it the day it arrived at my door and didn’t stop until it was finished, if that is any indication (of course, its brevity helps on that front).
May 30, 2020
3.5 stars -- "Night Birds" reads very much like an allegory, and as such, I felt like I was seeing the characters from a distance even though it is written in first person. I found myself drawn more to the two other pieces in this collection, especially Khet Mar's nonfiction story "Night Flow," which I felt helped illuminate the other two works. Definitely worth reading to get some insight into the struggles of an area of the world that is largely neglected by US media/journalism.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews