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 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.Arunava Sinha is the translator of Panty. He has translated over thirty books from Bengali. Winner of the Crossword translation award, for both Sankar's Chowringhee and Anita Agnihotri's Seventeen, and of the Muse India translation award for Buddhadeva Bose's When The Time Is Right, his translation of Chowringhee was also shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

Reviews
'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 ... 'Delightfully subversive.' - Joanna Walsh, author of Vertigo ... '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



Book Information
ISBN 9781911284000
Author Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay
Format Paperback
Page Count 128
Imprint Tilted Axis Press
Publisher Tilted Axis Press
Weight(grams) 66g