An unemployed young man is invited to his lover's wedding and decides to gift her a bottle of his own blood. Rumours of a great big flood or the end of days or a rebellion of refugees in Calcutta fly through the country. Haran majhi's starved widow's corpse floats down rivers and swamps and drains as the nation awaits eagerly the unveiling of the golden Gandhi statue from America. The early stories of Subimal Misra took the Bengali literary world by storm upon their publication in the late 1960s. Distinct from the conventional modes of storytelling that preceded him, Misra's pieces are more anti-stories than stories, a montage of images that flow into each other and tell a tale with greater power and urgency than narrative fiction. Every story hits hard, gripping the reader with intensity and an underlying fantastical horror that is firmly rooted in reality. V. Ramaswamy's exceptional translation brings to the fore the contemporaneity of Misra's work while retaining the verve and pungency of the original. Anti establishment and revolutionary,t hese stories by a writer whom many consider to be a cult figure in Bengali literature resonate with truths that are undeniable even today, forty years after they were written.

This book is the first of its kind to significantly concentrate on trans-nation, transnationalism and its dialogue with various nationalisms in South Asia. Taking the absence of discussion on transnationalism in South Asia as a conspicuous lacuna as well as a point of intervention, this book pushes the boundaries of scholarship further by organizing a dialogue between the nation-state and many nationalisms and the emergent method of transnationalism. It opens itself up for many cross-border movements, formulating the trans-South Asian discursive exchange necessitated by contemporary, theoretical upheavals. It looks at such exchanges through the prisms of literature and cinema and traces the many modes of engagement that exist between some of the globally dominant literary and cinematic forms, trying to locate these engagements and negotiations across three geopolitical formations and locations of culture, namely region, nation and trans-nation.

Missing, dead, disappeared, or otherwise absent mothers haunt us and the stories we tell ourselves. Our literature, from fairytales like Cinderella and The Little Mermaid to popular narratives like Cheryl Strayed's recent book Wild, is peopled with motherless children. The absent mother, whether in literature or life, may force us to forge an independent identity. But she can also leave a mother-shaped hole and a howling loneliness that dogs us through our adult lives. This anthology explores the theme of absent mothers from scholars and creative writers, who tell personal stories and provide the theoretical framework to recognize and begin to understand the impact of motherlessness that ripples through our cultures and our art.

About the Book THE SECOND PART TO THE RUNAWAY BOY, WINNER OF THE KALINGA LITERATURE The second part of this extraordinary trilogy takes us into the late 1960s and early 1970s when the rumblings of liberation grew louder in East Pakistan and refugees came pouring into India, seeking asylum in the camps of West Bengal. The Naxalite movement too was gathering momentum; the Communist Party split into CPI (M) and CPI (ML), and a bitter power tussle ensued between them and the ruling Congress Party led by Indira Gandhi. Amidst this bloody battle, we find a twenty-something Jibon in Calcutta, driven to rage by hunger, inequity and a naïve, contagious nationalistic fervour. This burning torch of a novel is a compelling portrait of a youth negotiating the streets of Calcutta, looking to seize a life that is constantly denied to him.

The book aims to introduce the Bengali writer (1948-2014) to a global audience through some of his short stories and poems in English translation and a series of critical essays on his works. A political commitment to literature frames Nabarun Bhattacharya's aesthetic project and the volume wishes to tease out the various perspectives on this complex meeting of politics and aesthetics. Be it the novel on dogs or those on petro-pollution and the machine, the political question in Nabarun echoes significant contemporary issues, such as animal rights, global warming and techno-capitalism. This opens up the possibility of questioning the traditional paradigm of humanist values in a world of catastrophic and violent encounters such as nuclear war or holocaust, which keeps returning in Nabarun's works.

About the Book FROM THE WINNER OF THE HINDU PRIZE 2018 AND THE SHAKTI BHATT PRIZE 2022 This powerful trilogy of semi-autobiographical novels begins in East Pakistan. It tells the story of little Jibon, who arrives at a refugee camp in West Bengal in the arms of his Dalit parents escaping from the Muslim-majority nation. He grows up perpetually hungry for hot rice in the camp where the treatment meted out to dispossessed families like his is deplorable. When he is barely thirteen, Jibon runs away to Calcutta because he has heard that money flies in the air in the big city. His wildly innocent imagination leads him to believe that he can go out into the world, find work and bring back food for his starving siblings and clothes for his mother whose only sari is in tatters. And once he leaves home, through the travels of this starving, bewildered but gritty boy, we witness a newly independent India as it grapples with communalism and grave disparities of all kinds.