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
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