The Book of Dhaka

A City in Short Fiction

Arunava Sinha, Pushpita Alam

9789382579557

New Delhi, 2017

164 pages

Price INR 295.00

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Dhaka may be one of the most densely populated cities in the world – noisy, grid-locked, short on public amenities, and blighted with sprawling slums – but, as these stories show, it is also one of the most colourful and chaotically joyful places you could possibly call home. Slum kids and film stars, day-dreaming rich boys, gangsters and former freedom fighters all rub shoulders in these streets, often with Dhaka’s trademark rickshaws ferrying them to and fro across cultural, economic and ethnic divides. 
 
Just like Dhaka itself, these stories thrive on the rich interplay between folk culture and high art; they both cherish and lampoon the city’s great tradition of political protest, and they pay tribute to a nation that was borne out of a love of language, one language in particular, Bangla (from which all these stories have been translated).

Pushpita Alam is the managing editor of Bengal Lights Books and in charge of the Dhaka Translation Center, both based at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh. 

Arunava Sinha translates classic, modern and contemporary Bangla fiction, non-fiction and poetry into English. 

Arunava Sinha

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 Book Award for Best Translation, for Sankar’s Chowringhee (2007) and Anita Agnihotri’s Seventeen (2011), respectively, and the winner of the Muse India translation award (2013) for Buddhadeva Bose’s When The Time Is Right, he has also been shortlisted for The Independent Foreign Fiction prize (2009) for his translation of Chowringhee and for the Global Literature in Libraries Initiative Translated YA Book Prize for his translation of Md Zafar Iqbal’s Rasha, and longlisted for the Best Translated Book award, USA, 2018, for his translation of Bhaskar Chakravarti’s Things That Happen and Other Poems. His translation of Manoranjan Byapari’s Batashe Baruder Gandha (There’s Gunpowder in the Air) was shortlisted in 2019 for the JCB Prize for Literature, the Crossword Book Award, the Mathrubhumi Book of the Year Prize and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. Besides India, his translations have been published in the UK and the USA in English, and in several European and Asian countries through further translation. He is an associate professor of practice in the Creative Writing department at Ashoka University.

Pushpita Alam

Pushpita Alam is the managing editor of Bengal Lights Books and in charge of the Dhaka Translation Center, both based at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh.