Shaheen Akhtar & Salma Bani 
Book of Dhaka 

Dhaka is the world’s tenth largest city with a population of more than 18 million people. We will bring ten unique short stories from this overwhelming, vibrant, capital city to English-reading audiences in the next installation of our popular ‘City in Short Fiction series’. Dhaka is an unknown quantity to most westerners. It is the capital city of Bangladesh, which emerged as a nation state in 1971 after a violent struggle for independence from West Pakistan. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the British Empire held this area as ‘Bengal’, but previous rulers included the Mughal Empire, the Hindu Sena dynasty and before that the Buddhist Pala Empire. Bangladesh, and Dhaka, therefore, has a very complex political and social history and an incredibly rich and varied cultural inheritance. Its central identifying characteristic is the Bangla language, and Comma are very excited to bring a host of challenging and exciting short stories in translation to a new audience.