A collection of inventive and surprising short stories from one of India’s most prominent countercultural writers.
 
In this wildly inventive collection of Nabarun Bhattacharya’s stories, we meet characters such as a trigger-happy cop in an authoritarian police state, a man who holds on to a piece of rope from a deadly noose, a retired revolutionary thrilled by delusions of grandeur, and people working for a corporation that arranges lavish suicides for a price. Ranging from scathing satires of society to surreal investigations of violence and love, these stories are also a window onto the political and social climate in Bengal, tracing both pan-Indian developments like the 1975 Emergency and local ones like militant-leftist Naxalism and the decades-long Communist reign in the state. Expertly translated from the Bengali, Hawa Hawa and Other Stories is a journey through the mind of one of the most daring countercultural writers of India, one with particular resonance in these chaotic times.

Nabarun Bhattacharya (1948–2014) was born into a family of writers, filmmakers, artists and academics. A journalist from 1973 to 1991, he gave up that career in order to become a full-time writer. His best-known works include the novel Harbert (1992). Subha Prasad Sanyal is the winner of the Harvill-Secker Young Translator’s Prize (2018). He is pursuing a degree in English from Jadavpur University, Calcutta.

1. Hawa Hawa
2. Spy
3. Long Live the Counter-Revolution
4. The Murderer’s Brother
5. Men of the Fountain
6. Night’s End
7. A Piece of Nylon Rope
8. Deathgrant
9. Toy
10. Olde Kahar’s Fortune
11. 4+1