10 Saadat Hasan Manto Books in English (And Which Translation to Buy)

Manto spent his best working years in Bombay, writing for the film studios and living in the parts of the city the studios pretended not to know. These stories come from there. Sex workers who are treated as people rather than lessons, pimps with professional pride, film extras waiting for a call that never comes, plus the drivers and landlords and hangers-on around them. Reeck and Ahmad translate into an English that still sounds like a street rather than a seminar, which matters, because Manto's Urdu was plain and fast and unliterary on purpose. He shows you a person, gives them one bad hour, and leaves.

Khalid Hasan gathers the famous Partition stories here along with the very short pieces Manto wrote as black-bordered vignettes, some of them four lines long and worse than any full-length story. Toba Tek Singh is in this book, the one about an inmate of a Lahore asylum who will not accept that his village now sits on the other side of a new border. Hasan's English moves easily and never makes you stop, which is both the appeal and the case against him, since Manto's own sentences are rougher and stranger than these.

Memon spent decades translating Urdu fiction and this is the fullest single-volume result, running to well over five hundred pages and taking in the Bombay stories, the Partition stories and a long run of pieces about performers, writers and the people who circle them. The title story comes out of the film studios where Manto worked. What separates the book from the cheaper selections is the discipline of the translation. Memon does not smooth him out, does not add a clarifying phrase, and lets the sentences stay as blunt as they are in Urdu. It reads like Manto instead of like good English prose.

This is the nonfiction: essays, statements he made when he was hauled into court for obscenity, letters, and pieces where he takes his own drinking and his own poverty and turns them into copy. Aakar Patel translates it in plain journalistic English, which fits, because Manto was a working journalist and screenwriter who wrote fast and for money. He explains why he writes about brothels, argues with the people prosecuting him, and is funny for long stretches, right up to the point where he stops being funny.

In 1948 Manto published a set of extremely short pieces about Partition, some no longer than a paragraph, and this Katha edition is where they sit in English alongside a wider selection of stories and an open letter aimed at the Prime Minister of India. The short pieces are the reason to buy it. Four lines can carry an entire riot, because he never tells you what to feel and never gives you a villain with a name. If you have only read the full-length stories, this shows you the other machine he had, the one that works by leaving almost everything out.

Rakhshanda Jalil's selection is the reason this book exists and the reason to own it. She goes for the pieces the bigger anthologies skip, so a reader who already has two collections still finds new work here. The three sketches include one where Manto writes about himself as though he were someone else, which is a strange and slightly cruel performance, and one of his letters to Uncle Sam, the running joke he aimed at American power. Jalil translates carefully and never performs. It is a small book, around 150 pages, and it works best as your fourth or fifth Manto rather than your first.

Just over a hundred pages, translated by Aatish Taseer into an English that is quick and current and stays out of the way. It carries the well known stories rather than the deep cuts, which is what makes it good as a gift and weak as a later purchase. The shortness is a real feature and not a compromise, since a reader who has never heard of Manto will finish this on a Sunday and come out wanting the big collections, whereas the same reader handed 574 pages will put it on a shelf and feel guilty for a year.

The American edition, thirty-two stories, with the translations coming from Khalid Hasan and Muhammad Umar Memon and a foreword by the poet Vijay Seshadri. The title story puts a stray dog between two hilltop positions of soldiers, one Indian and one Pakistani, with each side deciding the animal must belong to the other. It is the handsomest Manto in print, the sort of book that survives being lent out twice. The catch is arithmetic rather than literary: if you already own Mottled Dawn and My Name Is Radha, you own a good share of these translations.

Penguin put out a run of very short classics in 2025 to mark ninety years of the imprint, and Manto is one of them: eighty-four pages, Partition material, roughly the size of a phone. Nobody should buy this as their main Manto book. It exists for the reader standing in an airport with twenty minutes to spare, or for a teacher who wants to put a text in fifteen hands without a budget conversation. The one thing I could not confirm is who translated it, and on a Manto edition that is the first thing you should check.

Smell is one of the stories that put Manto in front of a judge, and reading it now the surprise is how little of it is actually explicit. The offence was in his refusal to be embarrassed. It is a story about a man, a woman he barely knows, a monsoon night, and the way memory attaches itself to a smell rather than to a face, and it does all of that in about fifteen minutes of reading. Penguin sells it as a single, which is an odd format for a classic and a perfect one for a trial run.