Panty - Softcover

Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1911284002 ISBN 13: 9781911284000

Publisher: Tilted Axis Press, 2016

Synopsis

A woman arrives alone in Kolkata, taking refuge in a deserted apartment while she waits to undergo an unspecified surgery. In this disorienting city, everything seems new and strange: the pavement-dwellers outside her block, the collective displays of religiosity, the power cuts and alarming acts of arson. Her sense of identity already shaken, when she finds a stained pair of leopard print panties in the otherwise-empty wardrobe she begins to fantasise about their former owner, whose imagined life comes to blur with and overlap her own.

Pairing manic energy with dark eroticism, Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay's writing has a surreal, feverish quality, slipping between fluid subjects with great stylistic daring. Credited with being the woman who reintroduced hardcore sexuality into Bengali literature, Bandyopadhyay is neither superficial nor sensationalistic, equally concerned with debates on religion and nationhood as with gender and sexuality.

About this title

Review:

"An unnerving, ominous and beautiful meditation on the loneliness of modern life."
-- The Guardian

"Delightfully subversive." -- Joanna Walsh, author of Vertigo

"An unnerving, ominous and beautiful meditation on the loneliness of modern life."
The Guardian

"Panty is dreamlike yet visceral, surreal but intimate. In these fragments of life, loneliness, curiosity, defiance and sexuality blend to create an uneasy picture of contemporary India. Divided from themselves, Bandyopadhyay's beguiling creations are as fractured and incomplete as contemporary life itself."
--Nina Power, author of One Dimensional Woman

"Vivid, beguiling, passionate, and never less than urgent, with Panty, India has found its Ferrante. You must read this book."
--Niven Govinden, author of All the Days and Nights

"Bandyopadhyay conjures something illusive, erotic, and gorgeously warped: a fractured revelation of self, of city. But for all of its deft surrealistic flourishes, this fever dream of Kolkata is never less than deadly serious about engaging with contemporary India s fragmented soul. An auspicious beginning for Tilted Axis."
--Dustin Illingworth, Lit Hub

About the Author:

Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay is the author of Panty. She has published nine novels and over fifty short stories since her controversial debut Shankini. Also a newspaper columnist and film critic, Sangeeta has recently moved from Kolkata to London. Tilted Axis will publish her novel Abandon, also translated by Arunava Sinha, in 2017.

About this edition

• Publisher: Tilted Axis Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1911284002
• ISBN 13: 9781911284000
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128