The Penguin Book of Bengali Short Stories

<b>Arunava Sinha</b> translates classic modern and contemporary Bengali fiction and nonfiction into English. Sixty-one of his translations have been published so far. Twice the winner of the Crossword translation award for Sankar's <i>Chowringhee</i> and Anita Agnihotri's <i>Seventeen</i> respectively and the winner of the Muse India translation award for Buddhadeva Bose's <i>When The Time Is Right</i> he has also been shortlisted for The Independent Foreign Fiction prize for his translation of <i>Chowringhee</i> and longlisted for the 2018 Best Translated Book award USA for his translation of Bhaskar Chakravarti's <i>Things That Happen and Other Poems</i>. He is an associate professor of practice in the Creative Writing department at Ashoka University. He was born and grew up in Kolkata and lives and writes in New Delhi. <p>The short story tells the many stories of Bengali literature like no other form can. Arriving in Bengal in the wake of British colonisers Bengali writers quickly made the prose short story their own and by the twentieth century a profusion of literary magazines and journals meant that short stories were being avidly read by millions.<br><br>Writers responded to this hunger for words with a ferocious energy which reflected the turmoil of their times: their 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 tales.<br><br>A first in English this anthology gathers together a century's worth of extraordinary stories. From a woman who eats fish in secret to the woes of an ageing local footballer the anxieties of a middle-class union rep to a lawyer who stumbles upon a philosopher's stone this is a collection that celebrates making art of life in all its difficulty and joy.</p> 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