Perfect Bound | 92 pages |
“Mary and Jonas were on the playground, twirling around and around, until Hi-C came back out of their mouths. Mary’s favorite cartoon was Looney Tunes. So was Jonas’. He asked her to marry him—she said yes, and he gave her a dandelion.” –from i am here And You Are Gone | ||||
| Shome Dasgupta’s debut chapbook, i am here And You Are Gone, maps the lifelong bond between Mary and Jonas, childhood friends perpetually approaching something more. Dasgupta weaves their world in elegant simplicity, striping imagery and prose to an essential core while never devaluing the sentiment behind it. | |||||
| i am here And You Are Gone is a love story that elevates above romanticized ideals, combining prosaic, poetic, and illustrative elements to describe a relationship in terms rarely explored in contemporary fiction. | |||||
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Praise “Shome Dasgupta writes about young love with a heartbreaking honesty and simplicity that transcends anything I’ve read in recent years. As we follow Jonas and Mary from kindergarten to senior year, we see a range of textual expression that is both innovative and wildly appealing. This book cracks powerful with youthful thunder, black echoes laced tightly with ephemeral innocence. Dasgupta’s debut hits the mark, and leaves one.” -Mel Bosworth, author of |
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| “From the start, I fell in love with this book. Shome Dasgupta takes on perhaps the most common of all subjects—love—and makes it somehow fresh and new. Stunning in its use of form, language and character, i am here And You Are Gone is a delight. The book and its author are remarkable. This is the first you may be hearing from Shome Dasgupta, but I can’t imagine it will be the last.”
-Rob Roberge, author of Working Backwards from the Worst Moment of My Life (Ren Hen Press) |
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| “In i am here And You Are Gone, Shome Dasgupta writes with a sparse and mathematical elegance, creating a system of symbols and spaces with which to describe young Jonas’ growing affection for his friend Mary. Throughout the too-fast years of their youth, the two friends hurtle across what must feel to them like a lifetime, moving like two near-parallel lines approaching the same point, one set so impossibly infinite that they might never reach it together. Still their paths pull close, closer, so close that no matter how we might look we may be unable to divine what unsolvable span it is that at the last separates them–and so perhaps us–from each other.”
-Matt Bell, author of How They Were Found (Keyhole Press) |
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| “Dasgupta manages to tell a very real story of love and loss while at the same time allowing us to experience a magical time in these characters’ lives. It may be a quick read at 88 pages, but you won’t soon forget the story of Mary and Jonas and will most likely be wondering what Dasgupta will write next.” | |||||
| “Quite frankly, I was unsure whether or not the writing would live up to the label, whether or not I would feel like I had just read the first place winner of an undoubtedly high number of submissions. Would Dasgupta’s book feel, in my opinion, deserving of the title ‘winner’?The short review is this: It is.”
-PANK, JA Tyler |
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| “This is a beautiful last gasp, or echoed, exhaled breath to the testament of how we are a part of the people that grow around and with us. A desperate wail to a night, to dancing on rooftops looking for “an acrobat of the universe,” this is human transparency. A dandelion never meant so much.”
-Book Punch Review, Christopher Bowen |
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| “i am here And You Are Gone provides a respite from everything written about love that is clichéd and overdone. Those who enjoy more detail in their fiction may find Dasgupta’s prose lacking, but those who can appreciate simplicity will see how far his minimalist approach can go in telling a story, and how much emotion it can evoke.”
-The Hipster Book Club, Megan Mowry |
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About the author
i am here And You Are Gone is his first sole-author bound book. Visit his official site at. www.shomedome.com |
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Shome Dasgupta is the author of i am here And You Are Gone (Winner Of The 2010 OW Press Fiction Chapbook Contest). He lives in Lafayette, LA and teaches at South Louisiana Community College. He received an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University-Los Angeles. His nonfiction, fiction, and poetry have appeared or will appear in Drunken Boat, Mad Hatters’ Review, Stymie Magazine, H_NGM_N, Café Irreal, Meadow, Magma Poetry, Shelf Life Magazine, Everyday Genius and elsewhere. His writing has been listed in the storySouth Million Writers Award Notable Stories of 2008 and has been nominated for The Best Of The Net 2009. As an undergraduate, Shome finished with a BA in History from the University Of Louisiana at Lafayette.
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