A landmark new anthology of Bengali literature in English including many previously untranslated stories A splendid guide to unmapped lands Sinha is one of the best living translators at work bringing the Bengali classics into English he writes with exceptional elegance and wit and is astonishingly productive The Spectator The prose short story arrived in Bengal in the wake of British colonizers and Bengali writers quickly made the form their own By the twentieth century a profusion of literary magazines and journals meant they were being avidly read by millionsWriters responded to this hunger for words with a ferocious energy which reflected the turmoil of their times these stories covered land wars famine the caste system religious conflict patriarchy Partition and the liberation war that saw the emergence of the independent country of Bangladesh Across these shifting geographical borders writers also looked inward evolving new literary styles and stretching the possibilities of social realism political fiction and intimate domestic talesA first in English this anthology gathers together a centurys worth of extraordinary stories From a woman who eats fish in secret to the woes of an ageing local footballer from the anxieties of a middleclass union rep to a lawyer who stumbles upon a philosophers stone this is a collection that celebrates making art of life in all its difficulty and joy
