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Hotel Calcutta

Paper Type: Book Print | Size: 216 x 140mm
Black and white; 224 pages; Paperback

ISBN-10: 9381523738 | ISBN-13: 978-93-81523-73-5

Fiction

350 | 15 | 6.99

The century-old Hotel Calcutta run by an Englishman, is under threat from land sharks who want to raze it and build a shopping mall. As the staff stare at uncertain times, a monk turns up at the hotel and prophesies that the hotel will still stand only if a wall of stories can be built. Peter Dutta—the manager—though a little unsure, is ready to give it a shot and begins looking for a storyteller. A painter, who has just stepped into the bar, volunteers to tell the first story. Next is Peter’s turn. As the storytelling fever catches on, new guests arrive every day, among them a shifty-eyed producer of porn flicks, an American woman who hears the footsteps of a dead soldier in the corridor and finally an odd pair who pretend to be war historians. It seems they have all arrived there with a purpose. Will their stories protect the hotel or will it crumble under the sledgehammers of the land sharks.

MEDIA COVERAGE

`Sheer power of storytelling'- The Telegraph

`A persuasive artist...Hotel Calcutta invites a hungry, urgent reading' - Asian Review of Books

`A very innovative frame story'- Journal of Commonwealth Literature

`An astounding work that interrogates the myriad surfaces of reality' - Indian Literature, Sahitya Akademi

Rajat Chaudhuri

Author

Rajat Chaudhuri has published six books in two languages including fiction and translation. He selected and edited The Best Asian Speculative Fiction (2018) collection of stories and is an editor of a forthcoming Asia-Pacific solar-punk anthology to be co-published by RIHN, Japan and World Weaver Press, US. Chaudhuri’s climate change novel, The Butterfly Effect (2018) is listed as one of `Fifty Must-Read Eco-disasters in Fiction’ by Book Riot (US) and has been widely mentioned in national media for its parallels with the Covid-19 pandemic.

Rajat has won a number of writing fellowships and international residency awards including British Council administered Charles Wallace Fellowship (UK), Hawthornden Fellowship (Scotland, UK), Ministry of Culture, Korea (ARKO)-INKO residency award (South Korea), Villa Sarkia residency award (Finland, invited 2020) and Sangam House (India) residency.

He has done book readings, offered workshops, presented keynotes, panel talks, presentations and other speaking assignments about climate change, better futures, storytelling, climate change fiction (cli-fi), environmental science fiction, pandemics health and environment among other issues in a variety of venues including Museum of Science Fiction, Washington D.C., US, George Washington University, US, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, Sahitya Akademi, Delhi, National Library of India, Osmania University, Dongguk University, Seoul, Chichester University, UK and several other places. He has published book reviews, essays, articles for The Telegraph, New Indian Express, Outlook, American Book Review, Asian Review of Books, The Statesman, Anandabazar Patrika (Bengali) and elsewhere.

As an environment activist Chaudhuri has contributed to the UNDP Human Development Report besides writing monographs and articles and he has been a climate advocate at the United Nations, New York. He recently finished translating an anthology of Bengali poetry and is currently putting finishing touches to a slipstream novel on madness.