Kathmandu, Aug. 24 -- A short story of eleven thousand words-even though short stories are mostly below that word limit-gets turned into a humongous book: Kathmandruids, Peter J Karthak's latest delivery, which is half-fiction, half-nonfiction.

Citing Gao Xingjian in the epigraph, Karthak presents his take on how novels should work, as if to justify his decision to merge the worlds of fiction and nonfiction. He writes that fiction is, in fact, made up of "travel notes, moralistic ramblings, feelings, jottings, unrhetorical discussions, unfable-like fables, some folk songs, your own legend-like nonsense"-all put together in a single bowl, or rather violently yoked together in a glamorous fashion. Yet, the very entropy of ideas makes the n...