Hassan’s State of Affairs

By Mirza Athar Baig| Haider Shahbaz

₹ 899.00 inclusive of all taxes

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About the book

Bestselling and critically acclaimed, Lahore-based Mirza Athar Baig is one of the most important contemporary Urdu writers. Hassan’s State of Affairs — his first book to be translated into English — is a surreal ride through Pakistan. It follows an accountant, Hassan, and a group of filmmakers, Masquerade Productions, who are working on Pakistan’s first surrealist film, titled This Film Cannot Be Made. As the film’s production runs into hurdles, escalating from the comic to the horrific, the text itself explodes into multiple storylines, genres and characters, and bends language and form — the result is an entirely new kind of novel. Brilliantly translated by Haider Shahbaz, this audacious, highly experimental, yet hugely entertaining book is a fitting introduction to one of the most exciting writers working in any language today.

Pages: 618

Available in: Paperback

Language: English

Mirza Athar Baig

MIRZA ATHAR BAIG is one of the most important contemporary writers in the Urdu language. A veteran professor of postmodern and postcolonial philosophy at Government College University, Lahore, Mirza announced his entry into fiction with avant-garde works that completely reshaped the field of contemporary Urdu fiction. He is the author of three novels – Ghulam Bagh, Sifr Se Aik Tak and Hassan Ki Surat-e-Haal – a collection of ‘anti-stories’, and more than a hundred plays for television.

Haider Shahbaz

HAIDER SHAHBAZ has a BA from Yale University and an MFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He was the 2016-17 Charles Pick Fellow at the University of East Anglia, and received an ALTA (American Literary Translators Association) Travel Fellowship in 2016 for his work on Baig’s fiction. He lives in Lahore.

“

So brash, so ambitious, and yet so accomplished. - Mohammad Hanif

Stylish, playful, profound and wild, this is a reading experience of extremes, written and translated with the kind of verve most of us can only dream of. I loved it. - Preti Taneja, author of We That Are Young

You hold in your hands a bizarre brainbox of a book in an extraordinary translation. Brace yourself – this book will take you on a wild ride through the labyrinthine world of one of contemporary Urdu’s most fascinating and incomparable writers. - Bilal Tanweer, author of The Scatter Here Is Too Great