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The Meat Market: Ten Stories and a Novella
Publisher:
Westland
| Author:
Mashiul Alam
| Language:
English
| Format:
Paperback
₹194
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258
OUTSTANDING SHORT FICTION FROM ONE OF BANGLADESH’S MOST INGENIOUS WRITERS.
In the village of Modhupur, the new mother Julekha’s breasts dry up, but to everyone’s consternation, her little baby finds a dog to suckle on; Allah’s angel gives little Khobir fifty takas to buy sweets but his gambling father snatches the money away; journalist Jamil spirals hearing that all communication has been cut off in his hometown of Roop Nagar after a girl is gangraped, hacked, cooked and eaten by young men; Modhu, a penniless farmhand, leaves for Dhaka to drive a rickshaw two weeks a month, while his wife is actively wooed and seduced by his neighbour; Aminul Islam gets slaughtered at a butcher’s shop in broad daylight on protesting the spiking of pure lamb meat with sheep and goat-meat.
Bordering on hyper-reality, leading Bengali writer Mashiul Alam’s stories hold up a mirror to Bangladeshi society. He effortlessly crosses over into the surreal, which at times, as a means for us to cope and sustain, serves as an escape from the blatant, daily horrors of reality, or turns the reader into a spectator witnessing heightened versions of plausible macabre events. Some stories disrupt our complacency while a few others are immensely tender—but all of them intensely political and rendered in sharp, precise prose. The Meat Market is a dazzling collection marking the arrival of a world-class writer for those who read in English.
Description
OUTSTANDING SHORT FICTION FROM ONE OF BANGLADESH’S MOST INGENIOUS WRITERS.
In the village of Modhupur, the new mother Julekha’s breasts dry up, but to everyone’s consternation, her little baby finds a dog to suckle on; Allah’s angel gives little Khobir fifty takas to buy sweets but his gambling father snatches the money away; journalist Jamil spirals hearing that all communication has been cut off in his hometown of Roop Nagar after a girl is gangraped, hacked, cooked and eaten by young men; Modhu, a penniless farmhand, leaves for Dhaka to drive a rickshaw two weeks a month, while his wife is actively wooed and seduced by his neighbour; Aminul Islam gets slaughtered at a butcher’s shop in broad daylight on protesting the spiking of pure lamb meat with sheep and goat-meat.
Bordering on hyper-reality, leading Bengali writer Mashiul Alam’s stories hold up a mirror to Bangladeshi society. He effortlessly crosses over into the surreal, which at times, as a means for us to cope and sustain, serves as an escape from the blatant, daily horrors of reality, or turns the reader into a spectator witnessing heightened versions of plausible macabre events. Some stories disrupt our complacency while a few others are immensely tender—but all of them intensely political and rendered in sharp, precise prose. The Meat Market is a dazzling collection marking the arrival of a world-class writer for those who read in English.
About Author
Mashiul Alam is a writer and translator who was born in northern Bangladesh in 1968. He studied journalism at the Peoples’ Friendship University in Moscow during the late 1980s and early 1990s. A journalist by profession, he worked at Prothom Alo, a leading Bengali daily in Bangladesh, for many years. He is the author of over a dozen books, including The Second Night with Tanushree (novel), Ghora Masud (novella), Mangsher Karbar (The Meat Market) and Pakistan. He has also translated the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Bertrand Russell into Bengali.
Alam was awarded the debut Sylhet Mirror Prize for Literature (2019), the IFIC Bank Literature Prize (2020) for his fiction, and the Panjeri-BTF Literary Translation Award (2024) for his translation of Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground. His short story ‘Doodh’, translated as ‘Milk’ by Shabnam Nadiya, was awarded the 2019 Himal Southasian Short Story Prize, and Shabnam Nadiya’s translation of his work entitled The Meat Market and Other Stories was awarded a 2020 PEN/Heim Translation Grant. He was also a Resident Fellow at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He is currently working on Laal Akash (Red Sky), a novel set in the Soviet Union during Perestroika.
Alam was awarded the debut Sylhet Mirror Prize for Literature (2019), the IFIC Bank Literature Prize (2020) for his fiction, and the Panjeri-BTF Literary Translation Award (2024) for his translation of Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground. His short story ‘Doodh’, translated as ‘Milk’ by Shabnam Nadiya, was awarded the 2019 Himal Southasian Short Story Prize, and Shabnam Nadiya’s translation of his work entitled The Meat Market and Other Stories was awarded a 2020 PEN/Heim Translation Grant. He was also a Resident Fellow at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He is currently working on Laal Akash (Red Sky), a novel set in the Soviet Union during Perestroika.
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