Gopinath Mohanty wrote his fictional masterpieces during the years just prior to and after Indian Independence. He was the first Odia and Indian writer to receive the Sahitya Akademi award, and the first among Odia litterateurs to receive the Jnanpith award. No wonder he is the most translated among modern Odia writers. After the international publication of the English translation of his cult novel Paraja in 1987* a steady stream of translations of his other major novels has poured in.
Given the fact that Mohanty wrote more than two hundred stories in which the themes, incidents, characters and situations in his novels were either first outlined or revisited in compressed form, there is a need to stage more of these stories in English for the national and international audience. And here comes a volume of translations by Sudeshna and Sudhansu Mohanty as if in answer to this long felt need. This would be the landmark book going by its prestigious publishing venue. Among the hidden gems featured here are some excellent stories such as ‘Endless’, ‘The Babu’, ‘License’, ‘A Good Samaritan’, ‘The Upper Crust’, ‘Paper Boat’, ‘Crows’, ‘Cricket’ and ‘The Foreigner’. The volume also contains the first ever story, ‘Da’, that Mohanty published while an M.A. student of English at Ravenshaw College, making the book a collector’s item.