“This collection of seven short stories examines day-to-day living, leading to existential questions which we want to ask but dare not raise. The nuances are to be found in the details. The stories tell themselves in these experimental narratives.”— The Hindu Literary Review

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“These stories are revelations in themselves. Real revelations! They mirror the middle and lower middle class Bengali populace. I’m impressed by their authenticity.”— Kiriti Sengupta

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Shambhabi Imprint is all set to launch The Mark, a collection of seven short stories by Bitan Chakraborty and translated from their original Bengali by Utpal Chakraborty. The collection enables readers to identify the often ignored signs of the day-to-day living. It also allows them to revisit memories, resulting in revival of a few existential queries, buried in our hearts for years. Editor and poet Dustin Pickering comments in his foreword: “Bitan Chakraborty is in defiance of the postmodern tropes that rule conventional storytelling in contemporary fiction. The brilliance of his storytelling is he does not defy deconstruction, but rather elaborates on it thematically. The story begins and ends on the same note, with the same trouble. Yet the full picture does not emerge until we endure the story with the characters. We become participants or observers of the action as we pick through its details. Chakraborty is not reacting against postmodern philosophy—instead, he is revealing a visionary approach to solving the impasse of the narrator by letting the story tell itself as well as inviting the reader’s surprise.”

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Pickering rightly points out: “Chakraborty’s stories also have their uniquely crafted style. They create microcosms within microcosms—as if each twist runs parallel to the opening—like planets revolving around the sun by the law of gravity.”