Short stories and a novella. First work of fiction, written in Bengali. The `Cal' of Calculus might be Calcutta's nickname. Culus on the other hand is a more obscure element. A tantric guru, an autorickshaw driver who speaks in Sanskrit, a crooner called Napoleon singing in a bar in Calcutta's Waterloo street, book publishers with a sinister agenda, a detective who is losing his mind, an author of bestselling pop-fiction, spooks and salesmen come together in these tales offering a glimpse of strangeness, absurdity and improbabilities that seep unnoticed into everyday existence. The stories while plot driven foreground the spiritual vacuum of the present using satire, wit and sometimes black humour. A critic writing for the Bengali magazine Ekak Matra has written that these stories , `transport us to a symbolic plane of existence, perched between the possible and the impossible'. Published by Gangchil (2014) Calcutta. Read more >
Listed in `The Definitive Climate Fiction Reading List’'Grist (US)
`Joyously ambitious solarpunk ... excels when entwining relational nuance with keenly handled futurist ideas ... number of gems for fans of climate fiction'Publishers Weekly
`Excellent translation ... Hard to find flavour of a culture in ferment'Scroll
`What comes across in the translations, from the very beginning, are the poems' distinctive Bengali origin'Daily Star (Bangladesh)
`Social-existential cares are interwoven with allusions to local or national issues ... will subtly shift our perception as to the currents of Bengali underground poetry'New Indian Express
An exceptional piece by Debal Deb, one of the heroes of the struggle to preserve biodiversity in the face of opposition from industrial agricultural and its client institutions. https://t.co/vVqNwPgItp
Teaching short stories this semester, I already have some great flash and I'll be using @rajatchaudhuri's Multispecies Cities anthology but any other recommendations of stories under 2k words by writers of colour, those with regional voices or working class subjects? Pls RT
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