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Shome Dasgupta, a young American author of Bengali descent, uses magical realism to explore his South Asian roots in this series of fourteen stories mostly set in modern day Kolkata, the city his parents came from and the one where their extended families continue to live. The stories reflect the surrealistic dimensions of an American boy/man's visits "home." They engage with memorable individuals, from barristas to beggars, boatment to bus drivers. The disjunct between cultures provides a nexus out of which subtle symbols develop. Thus, "Tagore's Kiss" enacts the tension between India's…mehr

Produktbeschreibung
Shome Dasgupta, a young American author of Bengali descent, uses magical realism to explore his South Asian roots in this series of fourteen stories mostly set in modern day Kolkata, the city his parents came from and the one where their extended families continue to live. The stories reflect the surrealistic dimensions of an American boy/man's visits "home." They engage with memorable individuals, from barristas to beggars, boatment to bus drivers. The disjunct between cultures provides a nexus out of which subtle symbols develop. Thus, "Tagore's Kiss" enacts the tension between India's strict courtship conventions and America's looser ones. Its protagonists deal with the human impulse to bend or break rules, much as Kolkata's favorite writer, Rabindranath Tagore, had done. "Samosa" invites readers into the eerily dissociative mind of a beggar. "Anklet" is a painfully beautiful story of dreams not quite articulated, not quite deferred. In "This Is My Head" we watch a family's awkward interaction with a deeply depressed uncle, who speaks gnomically: "I am crazy. Watch me corrode." Dasgupta's stories are compassionate, witty, and puzzling. How are we to react when an oddly intense man claims personal ties to American President Top Gun? When a badminton birdie turns out to be a real blackbird? When a simple hug makes a grieving clown's hair grow bright again? Dasgupta's symbolic coding is often exquisite. In "Empty Chair," the only story set firmly in the USA, one recognizes a trope familiar to Indian logicians and poets: "the presence of your absence" can be palpable.
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Autorenporträt
Shome Dasgupta is the author of ten books, including The Seagull And The Urn (HarperCollins India), Spectacles (Word West Press), i am here And You Are Gone (Winner of the 2010 OW Press Fiction Contest), Anklet And Other Stories (Golden Antelope Press), and a poetry collection, Iron Oxide (Assure Press). Forthcoming novels Tentacles Numbing (Thirty West) and The Muu-Antiques (Malarkey Books). His writing has appeared in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Hobart, New Orleans Review, X-R-A-Y, American Book Review, New Delta Review, Magma Poetry, and elsewhere. His fiction and poetry have been anthologized in Best Small Fictions 2019 and Best Small Fictions 2021 (Sonder Press), The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing (&Now Books), and Poetic Voices Without Borders 2 (Gival Press). His work has been featured as a storySouth Million Writers Award Notable Story, and his stories and poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, Best Of The Net, and the Orison Anthology. He is the series editor of the Wigleaf Top 50. He lives in Lafayette, LA and can be found at www.shomedome.com and @laughingyeti.