This beloved cult novel―about a young man who makes a business of relaying messages from the dead―is now in a sparkling English translation Poor, poor, hard-luck Herbert Sarkar: born into a fancy Calcutta family but cursed from birth (his philandering movie director father is killed in a car crash and his mother dies soon after, when he’s still just a baby), he is taken as an orphan into his uncle’s house, only to fall further and further down the family totem pole. Despite good looks (“Hollywood-ish, Leslie Howard-ish)” and native talents, he is scorned by all but his kind aunt. Poor Herbert: so lovable but so little loved. Cheated of his inheritance, living on the roof in cast-off clothing, he pines for love, but all is woe: his own nephews beat him up. At twenty, however, he suddenly seems to possess the gift of speaking with the dead. Herbert is bathed in glory. From less than zero to starry heights―what an apotheosis. The wheel of fortune turns again, all too soon... Legendary, scathingly satiric, wildly energetic, deeply tender, Herbert is an Indian masterwork.

Harbart

Literature & Fiction

Bhattacharya, Nabarun

Humor & Satire

New Directions

May 1992. In Russia, Boris Yeltsin is showing millions of communists the specter of capitalism. Yugoslavia is disintegrating. United Germany is uncertain about their next move, and communism is collapsing all around. And in a corner of old Calcutta, Herbert Sarkar, sole proprietor of a company that delivers messages from the dead, decides to give up the ghost. Decides to give up his aunt and uncle, his friends and foes, his fondness for kites, his aching heart that broke for Buki, his top terrace from where he stared up at the sky, his Ulster overcoat with buttons like big black medals, his notebook full of poems, his Park Street every evening when the sun goes down, his memory of a Russian girl running across the great black earth as the soldiers lift their guns and get ready to fire, his fairy who beat her wings against his window and filled his room with blue light . Surreal, haunting, painful, beautiful and astonishing in turn, and sweeping us along from Herbert’s early orphan years to the tumultuous Naxalite times of the 1970s to the explosive events after his death, Bhattacharya’s groundbreaking novel is now available in a daring new translation and holds up before us both a fascinating character and a plaintive city.

Herbert (The India List)

Seagull Books

A collection of inventive and surprising short stories from one of India's most prominent countercultural writers. &nbsp; 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.

Hawa Hawa: and Other Stories (The India List)

Short Stories & Anthologies

Beggar’s Bedlam (The India List)

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Books by Bhattacharya, Nabarun