India, Sept. 13 -- A literary magazine is like a lucky dip - you never know what will come your way.

This is what draws me to these publications. I subscribe to the New Yorker, the Mekong Review and now Hyphen and open up every issue with excitement - Will I find something dark and strange? A story that leaves me wondering why I have never read this writer before? Or a laugh out loud treat?

Almost certainly, literary magazines are where offbeat work turns up long before it reaches the regular bookshelves.

So it is with the first print edition of Hammock magazine, an olive-green paperback titled The City and priced at Rs. 899 (Kindle e-book: Rs.449). The anthology includes a horror story set in Chennai, a picaresque tale of a city bus i...