Ten Days Of The Strike: Selected Stories

‘Incredible … tender, bookish and weary, as well as soaked through with rage’ — ANJUM HASAN

‘Important stories that afford readers a glimpse of the richness of experience and experimentation in Indian literature’ — ANUKRTI UPADHYAY

‘Keenly observed and finely detailed’ — JAYASREE KALATHIL

Sandipan Chattopadhyay was one of the pioneers of modern Bengali literature, and among the foremost fiction writers of his time. A staunch anti-establishment figure and a supporter of creative freedom, his writings reflect his concerns with class and gender relations and the absurdity of the human condition, while blurring the distinctions between the mainstream and the parallel stream.

Freedom and revolution, passion and hatred, love and death, memories and forgetting collide in the stories in this volume. Here we will find: a family dealing with the vagaries of a blocked toilet; a man setting fire to the fictional worlds he has inhabited for years; the touch of a blue hand marking a boy for life. Daring and provocative, they make for disturbing but uniquely rewarding reading.

Brilliantly rendered by award-winning translator Arunava Sinha, Ten Days of the Strike brings a comprehensive selection of Sandipan Chattopadhyay’s work to English readers for the very first time.