ANKLET AND OTHER STORIES

Shome Dasgupta, a young American author of Bengali descent, uses magical realism to explore , his South Asian roots in this series of fourteen stories mostly set in modern day Kolkata, the city his parents came from and the one where their extended families continue to live. , The stories reflect the surrealistic dimensions of an American boy/man',s visits ",home.", , They engage with memorable individuals, from barristas to beggars, boatment to bus drivers. The disjunct between cultures provides a nexus out of which subtle symbols develop. Thus, ",Tagore',s Kiss", , enacts the tension between India',s strict courtship conventions and America',s looser ones. , Its protagonists deal with the human impulse to bend or break rules, much as Kolkata',s favorite writer, Rabindranath Tagore, had done. ",Samosa", invites readers into the eerily dissociative mind of a beggar. ",Anklet", is a painfully beautiful story of dreams not quite articulated, not quite deferred. In ",This Is My Head", we watch a family',s awkward interaction with a deeply depressed uncle, who speaks gnomically