HarperCollins presents The Earth Quakes: Late Anti-Stories by Subimal Misra, translated from the Bengali by V. Ramaswamy

20 February 2024

presents

The Earth Quakes

Late Anti-Stories

by Subimal Misra

Translated from the Bengali by V. Ramaswamy

HARPER PERENNIAL

Subimal Misra – anarchist, activist, anti-establishment, experimental ‘anti-writer’

– was a literary genius, and among India’s greatest contemporary masters. 

As unique and unprecedented as each of the earlier volumes, The Earth Quakes is a fitting finale to the ground-breaking Subimal Misra translation project undertaken by translator-activist extraordinaire V. Ramaswamy. 

Paperback | 468 pp | Rs 599

Available wherever books are sold | Releasing 26^th Feb 2024

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Praise for Subimal Misra

‘Misra’s stories are not seductive; their power lies in their subversion. They look straight into the dark heart of the middle class and … undercut the pretensions and hypocrisies by which we live.’ – JERRY PINTO

‘A violent mix of fragmentary narratives and essays, even statistics, juxtaposed together to deliver a shocking statement.’ – AMITAVA KUMAR

V. Ramaswamy, says, “Like one finds a copy of the Bible in every hotel room in some parts of the world, I imagine there will be a cult of readers who always keep a Subimal Misra book near at hand for vital reading in difficult times, and especially this book!”

Associate Publisher, HarperCollins India, Rahul Soni, says, “Subimal Misra’s was an utterly singular – and essential – voice, forcing readers to confront not only the realities of the world around them, but the reality of their own selves as well. Constantly pushing at and breaking the boundaries of the medium can do, Misra, to my mind, is one of the greatest writers the country has produced. There are authors whose work can change lives – Misra is one of them. And V. Ramaswamy’s 4-volume project to bring him to English readers – now coming to a spectacular close with The Earth Quakes – is, I think, essential reading for everyone.”

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About the Book

Subimal Misra – anarchist, activist, anti-establishment, experimental ‘anti-writer’ – was a literary genius, and among India’s greatest contemporary masters. Misra’s works are confrontational, and challenge and provoke readers morally, politically, and in their expectations of literature. The Earth Quakes: Late Anti-Stories brings together his final creations: twenty stories written between 1991 and 2010, their subjects ranging from the ‘global’ – the Gulf War of 1991, which heralded the post-Cold War unipolar world – to the very ‘local’ – the Singur movement of 2006 that led to the unseating of the all-powerful CPI (M), which had ruled the state of West Bengal since 1977. As unique and unprecedented as each of the earlier volumes, The Earth Quakes is a fitting finale to the groundbreaking Subimal Misra translation project undertaken by translator-activist extraordinaire V. Ramaswamy.

About the Author and Translator

Subimal Misra was born in 1943 and his writing career spanned over four decades. The cliched label, ‘anti-establishment’, is often applied the moment his name is mentioned. But since ‘anti-establishment’ now seeks to become the establishment, he opposed that too. He was entirely a little-magazine writer, not having written a single letter outside little magazines in his career. Some say Misra brought a different genre into Bengali literature, which made his writing distinctive. From a stance of all-round opposition he said, ‘I try to think differently and yet people make an uproar about me – the two can’t coexist, that can’t be. If I attain instant recognition and popularity, then I would think that what I’m doing is not new.’ When the way of saying becomes the subject was one of his favourite expressions, with a debt to Jean-Luc Godard, of course. He also said that he didn’t believe in any prevalent one-dimensional label: Whatever is accepted as correct is what has to be examined much more. Misra passed away in February 2023.

V. Ramaswamy lives in Kolkata. This is his fourth book of Subimal Misra in translation, the others being The Golden Gandhi Statue from America: Early Stories, Wild Animals Prohibited: Stories, Anti-Stories, and This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar’s Tale: Two Anti-Novels. He was a recipient of the Literature Across Frontiers–Charles Wallace India Trust fellowship in creative writing and translation at Aberystwyth University in 2016, the New India Foundation translation fellowship in 2022, the PEN Presents award in 2022, and the Bangla Translation Foundation (Dhaka) prize for the best translated book of 2022.

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For reviews, excerpts, interviews, and more information, please contact Vandana Rathore at
vandana.rathore@harpercollins.co.in