Book excerpt: Bringing together the best of Vaid’s highly experimental short stories, The Sculptor in Exile makes for exhilarating reading. Rigour and wit inform these complex and transgressive meditations on time, love, death, marriage, ageing, selfhood and creativity. While they vary widely in form, tone and length, recurring through the collection are stories that reflect on the figure of the artist in self-imposed exile. In his explorations of interior darkness, Vaid often pushes his experiments to the edge but never loses his footing.