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Dog Star
Nabarun Bhattacharya
Seagull Books, 2025
Set in the underbelly of Calcutta, a story that reimagines a city’s relationship with its abandoned animals, interlacing dark humor and political critique into a fable of resistance.

A city on edge and a reckoning long overdue—Dogstar is a searing fable of vengeance and the limits of human empathy. Nabarun Bhattacharya’s novella unfolds in Calcutta, where the city’s dogs, brutalized and unseen, rise in defiant revolt against their human oppressors. As the streets turn into battlegrounds, history itself bleeds through—echoes of past atrocities and ancient mythologies intertwining with the raw immediacy of the present.

With his signature blend of dark humor and sharp political critique, Bhattacharya crafts a hypnotic tale that forces us to confront a chilling question: Who, in the end, is truly human? Blurring the boundaries between the real and the mythic, Dogstar is a dystopian allegory as disorienting as it is revelatory. For readers drawn to Orwellian fables and narratives that unsettle and illuminate in equal measure, this is a read that will haunt and provoke long after the final page.
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front cover of Hawa Hawa
Hawa Hawa
and Other Stories
Nabarun Bhattacharya
Seagull Books, 2022
A collection of inventive and surprising short stories from one of India’s most prominent countercultural writers.
 
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.
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