Book Description
'Subimal Misra may be the most important Bengali writer alive whom you have never heard of.' - The Statesman 'Long before Roberto Bolano, Misra had captured the disturbing, enigmatic landscape of the counterculture in a way that is subversive without being pretentious, Indian without being exotic, and somehow both contemporary and classic at once.' - The New Indian Express Audacious experimentalist and self-declared anti-writer, Subimal Misra is the master of contemporary alternative Bengali literature and anti-establishment writing. This collection brings together twenty-five stories that record the dark history of violence and degeneration in Bengal of the seventies and eighties. The mirror that Misra holds up to society breaks every canon of rectitude with unfailing precision. The stories also plot the continuous evolution of Misra's writing as he searches for a form to do justice to the reality that confronts us.Deeply influenced by Godard, Misra uses montage and other cinematic techniques in his stories, which he himself calls 'anti-stories', challenging our notions of reading and of literature itself. Brilliantly translated by V. Ramaswamy, Wild Animals Prohibited: Stories/Anti-stories startles with its blasphemy, its provocative ideas and its sheer formlessness.
