{"product_id":"9781906497491","title":"Bait: Four Stories","description":"\u003cp\u003eUnlike most of Mahasweta Devi’s works, which focus on Bengali tribes and the rural dispossessed, the four stories collected in \u003ci\u003eBait \u003c\/i\u003eare located in the urban and suburban criminal underworld, and form an unusual segment of Devi’s oeuvre.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe first story, “Fisherman,” is about a man who recovers the bodies of young boys from the village pond so that the police can pass them off as victims of drowning. “Knife,” on the other hand, is a tongue-in-cheek account of the liminal cultural world of West Bengal, which borders Bangladesh. A young woman makes her own protest against an exploitative establishment as a result of abuse by a politician and his cohorts in “Body.” An unemployed middle-class youth discovers himself after his first “test” killing in the dark story “Killer.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis collection of fascinating and unsettling stories is anchored by an in-depth introductory essay by cultural historian Sumanta Banerjee who has firsthand familiarity with the settings and situations from his crime-reporting past. Banerjee contextualizes the stories within the development of the growing criminal underworld in Bengal today.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Seagull Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47039486427376,"sku":"9781906497491","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781906497491_p0.jpg?v=1763616528","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781906497491","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}