Herbert

‘This first U.S. publication brings off a remarkable resurrection, one that erupts full-blooded, alive with laughter, stink and rage.’
John Domini Washington Post

‘Swift and strange, [Herbert] tells the story of its titular character, an orphan whose life is characterized by loss and longing: a sweeping view of the richness and the turmoil of Bengali culture, literature, and politics in the twentieth century.’
New Yorker

‘[Sunandini] Banerjee’s acrobatic translation is both enormously fun and true to the radical content. The writing disrupts the hegemony of the English language from the inside by celebrating the multilingualism possible within it.’
Asymptote

‘Nimble and vivid, Bhattacharya’s slippery narrative slithers forward and sideways through time: an acute, idiosyncratic reading experience.’
Publishers Weekly

‘What is needed [now] is a kind of novel that attends to how society is being organized by certain vested interests; a novel that goes to the heart rather, goes for the jugular of the economic system itself. [Herbert] is prophetic of this tradition to come.’
Ratik Asokan 4Columns

‘ [ Herbert] reads like Rainer Maria Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge set in Calcutta. Featuring a young man with an open channel to the dead who drinks and grieves to excess, it is a mosaic of manic and immersive episodes. It is a spinning drunken stumble through a city that feels menacingly sensual.’
Nate McNamara LitHub