jmal Kamal is the soft-spoken man behind A City Press, a publishing house that is now all set to launch the city’s newest book shop not just a book
Brave New by well known foreign Literature articular
shop, but a place he hopes. to turn into a meeting point for writers and readers. What sets City Press apart from other book shops in the city is not just its small coffee corner, but also its owner’s determination to print quality literature at “very affordable prices.”
No stranger to publish-ing. Mr. Kamal used to work for NDFC before he launched the quarterly Aaj in 1989, first working part time, then moving on to become its full time editor.
City Press has no preten-tions of challenging heavy-weights like OUP and Ferozesons. Instead, it aims to satisfy more selective lit-erary tastes, and will target an exacting coterie of Urdu literati through competitive pricing and high standards of writing.
Marquez.
As head of a non-profit concern, Mr. Kamal certainly has no illusions about any of his publications landing up on best seller lists. He sees his office premises in the bustling Madina Centre next to Zainab Market as a place where serious book lovers can gather to enjoy brews and exchange ideas and opinions on just about any subject under the sun.
Only a handful of days shy of its official launch around the end of November, City Press has managed to assemble an auspicious, though esoteric, stable of titles, the majority of them of Urdu fiction and poetry. It will be printing quarterly issues of its flagship Urdu anthology. Aoj, which show-cases local talent and prints Urdu translations of works literati-a issue was devoted to the short fiction of Nobel laureate, Gabriel Garcia
But creative writing is not the only dish on the City Press menu. Urdu transla-tions of Hindi, Farsi, and English books of a political and historical bent are either in the pipeline or already completed.
Arundhati Roy’s impassioned plea for nuclear non-prolif-eration in South East Asia will soon be available in an Urdu translation. For the English reader, a limited number of titles focusing on urban and rural develop-ment are on offer. There is a series of books on Karachi in the offing. Mr. Kamal even plans to exhibit a number of paintings by local artists, adding another facet to the artistic environment.
-Khalid Ansari
Newsline November 1998