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In this collection of short stories and other miscellaneous moments, Shome Dasgupta creates a world that is somehow both clearly ours as well as barely recognizable. Dasgupta, the author of The Seagull And The Urn (Harper Collins India, 2013), weaves sophistication into pop surrealism, stripping away the meaningless noise that surrounds us and turning up the volume on our sticky yet ever-changing, beautifully disastrous lives. With Dasgupta as our guide, we are able to transcend time, and even verb tense, creeping in and out of postmodern fairytales gone awry. We examine our most awkward high school gymnasium memories and explore, with an unusual objectivity, how one’s dream date can drift away into another’s nightmare. It’s possible that Mute offers more questions than answers, uncertainties that are more satiating than any one-size-fits-all explanation could ever present.
About the author
Shome Dasgupta is the author of ten books, including The Seagull And The Urn (HarperCollins India), Spectacles (Word West Press), i am here And You Are Gone (Winner of the 2010 OW Press Fiction Contest), Anklet And Other Stories (Golden Antelope Press), and a poetry collection, Iron Oxide (Assure Press). Forthcoming novels Tentacles Numbing (Thirty West) and The Muu-Antiques (Malarkey Books). His writing has appeared in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Hobart, New Orleans Review, X-R-A-Y, American Book Review, New Delta Review, Magma Poetry, and elsewhere. His fiction and poetry have been anthologized in Best Small Fictions 2019 and Best Small Fictions 2021 (Sonder Press), The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing (&Now Books), and Poetic Voices Without Borders 2 (Gival Press). His work has been featured as a storySouth Million Writers Award Notable Story, and his stories and poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, Best Of The Net, and the Orison Anthology. He is the series editor of the Wigleaf Top 50. He lives in Lafayette, LA and can be found at www.shomedome.com and @laughingyeti.
