Latest Book Publication: Histories Of Memories

My prose collection, Histories Of Memories, is now available for pre-order from Belle Point Press. Please click here for more information.

Memories can coax and soothe. They can break us in an instant, or help to heal deep wounds. It makes no difference if they are whole or fragmented; memories pull us around in time, whether we’re prepared for that journey or not, and bring us straight back into the sounds and tastes and feelings and dreams that make us who we are. That’s exactly the force harnessed by Shome Dasgupta’s new collection of stories, Histories of Memories. Page by page, these stories transport, restore, nourish, and remind. They bring us chocolates and curries, mud and family, songs and sights from all over the planet. More than anything, they show us humanity. And for that, for this author, I am truly grateful.

 

—Jack B. Bedell, author of Against the Woods’ Dark Trunks, Poet Laureate of Louisiana, 2018-2019

In the vulnerable, gorgeously written, and brilliantly illustrated Histories of Memories, Shome Dasgupta offers the reader an unflinching account of love and loss, failure and redemption, pleasure and pain. Dasgupta layers locations, Kolkata, Edmonton, Munich, with soundtracks, Dr. Dolittle, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Magnolia, and family, mother, father, uncle, brother, with friends, lifelong and long gone, a mixtape filled with his distinctive lyricism. On this carefully curated journey, where he sometimes takes our hands, leading us along winding paths, and other times flings us far out into space or drops us deep into a swirl of firing synapses, Dasgupta is always pushing us and himself to uncover, discover, recover meaning and, ultimately, memory.

—Melissa Llanes Brownlee, author of Hard Skin and Kahi and Lua

Description:

This hybrid collection of short prose pieces and Elliott Smith-inspired illustrations carries readers along a thin thread of memory—whether their own or the author’s past, it becomes difficult to say. Shome Dasgupta’s latest book recalls days at the movies, family heartache, and other personal experiences through soundtracks, daydreams, and attempts to remember what lingers from the spectrums of time. Whether pondering the vulnerability of a turtle or reflecting on his own fragilities, Dasgupta’s dreamy prose lets us into a series of fragments that depict a world broken yet beautiful. Histories of Memories is a testament to the burdens as well as the delights of our own narratives—how they keep us tied to each other whether we realize it or not.