Mr Secondhand and Other Stories

‘When elderly Mr Secondhand surprises everyone in St Jerome’s Colony, Dona Paula, by getting a wife, everyone suspects the wife is secondhand too. But Mr Secondhand has more surprises up his sleeve. Another eponymous hero, Lancelot Gomes, “at least fifty plus”, marries again and again. The nameless narrator of “Taverna”, seeing which way the wind is blowing, changes his caju-fuelled tune. Shetty’s stories can turn darker or lighter, and sometimes both at the same time, when all that his characters seem to be doing is exchanging pleasantries. He writes fiction like few others because the magic of his stories is driven as much by what he hears as by what he sees around him.’
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

‘Manohar Shetty’s uniquely picaresque tales are imbued with wry wit and a youthful freshness of language. They succeed in showing us that the ordinariness of life is itself a gift.’
Kavery Nambisan

‘Reading Manohar Shetty is like having a bun-and-maska tea break. These stories are fresh, roundly satisfying, and unfailingly enjoyable. Set mostly in the imaginary St Jerome’s Colony in Dona Paula, Shetty’s unforgettable characters are glowingly Goan, but their spirit is universal. We recognize them afterwards in a cousin, an aunt, an uncle, or a friend. Shetty handles even the wickedest of his colourful people with an ironic warmth. He is the Mario Miranda of Goan literature.’
C.P. Surendran

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Manohar Shetty (b. Bombay) spent nine years in a boarding school in Panchgani and graduated from the University of Bombay. He has published Full Disclosure: New and Collected Poems (1985-2017), comprising his eight books of poems, including Domestic Creatures, Living Room and Creatures Great and Small. Borderlines, his latest book of poems, was published by Copper Coin in 2023. His poems have appeared in a number of literary journals, such as London Magazine, Poetry Review (London), Wasafiri and Poetry Wales, for which he edited a special India number. In the US his poems have been published in New Letters, Chelsea, Shenandoah, Atlanta Review, Rattapallax, The Baffler, Fulcrum and The Common. Several anthologies feature his work, notably The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets, edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, and anthologies edited by Eunice de Souza, Vilas Sarang, Jeet Thayil and Arundhathi Subramaniam.

He has edited Ferry Crossing: Short Stories from Goa (Penguin), which has gone into several reprints, and Goa Travels: Being the Accounts of Travellers from the 16th to the 21st Century (Rupa). He has worked in various magazines and newspapers in Mumbai, Bangalore and Goa and was editor of Goa Today for eight years. He has been a Sahitya Academy (Indian Academy of Letters), Homi Bhabha and Raza Foundation Fellow and has lived in Goa since1985.

The Greatest Goan Stories Ever Told (Aleph) is the latest book edited by him.