The Laughing Yeti

Thursday, March 21, 2024

Latest Book Publication: Atchafalaya Darling

My collection of Louisiana themed short stories, Atchafalaya Darling, is now available for pre-order from Belle Point Press. Please click here for more information.

There’s so much tenderness in these stories, all wrapped in vibrantly bubbling scenes and conversations. Dasgupta cares about all these characters and it shows all over the pages and pulls a reader in.

—Aimee Bender, author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

In Shome Dasgupta's latest collection, the dream-like world of South Louisiana shimmers through one of its most original voices. Atchafalaya Darling contains local music scenes, crumbling homes, and creature comforts amid the convergence of wild hopes and rural spaces. Each story navigates the nature of memory, lost or found, sprinkled like spice into the red of the crawfish. While this collection often portrays immense grief—whether from hurricane winds or splintered dreams—each character clings to a love for place and the people who make it home. Atchafalaya Darling is an homage to Cajun culture, providing ten glimpses into this region like a series of faded Polaroid pictures held under the sun.

Atchafalaya Darling, by Shome Dasgupta

**PRE-ORDER**

Forthcoming Publication Date: July 9, 2024

*Pre-orders receive a free copy of Prose #15 by Shome Dasgupta or another Prose Series installment of your choice—please let Belle Point Press know in the order notes.*

Friday, August 4, 2023

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.