India, Aug. 20 -- Bangladeshi writer Mashiul Alam's short stories, translated from Bengali by Shabnam Nadiya, are intensely political. Often macabre, these hyperreal stories hit hard, and seem strangely within the realm of possibility.

The opening story, The Milk, prepares readers for what is to follow in the next 10 stories, and the novella. Barely two months after 24-year-old Julekha, a bonded labourer, has her baby, her milk dries up. She is in utter distress, yet her boy continues to grow on a diet of rice-water and dirt in the company of baby goats and lambs, as his humans who work day and night have no time for him. The boy starts crawling, and then, one day, drags himself towards a mother dog, whose new born pups were devoured by ...