The Penguin Book of Bengali Short Stories

A landmark anthology, staking a new claim for Bengali literature in English

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 millions. Writers 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 tales. 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 aging local footballer, from 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.Arunava Sinha translates classic, modern, and contemporary Bengali fiction and non-fiction into English. Sixty-one of his translations have been published so far. Twice the winner of the Crossword Translation Award, for Sankar’s Chowringhee and Anita Agnihotri’s Seventeen, respectively, and the winner of the Muse India Translation Award for Buddhadeva Bose’sWhen The Time Is Right, he has also been shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction prize for his translation of Chowringhee, and longlisted for the 2018 Best Translated Book Award USA for his translation of Bhaskar Chakravarti’s Things That Happen and Other Poems. He is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Ashoka University. He was born and grew up in Kolkata, and lives and writes in New Delhi.