Book Review: The Year’s Best- Collection of Bengali Short Stories in Translation, 2025 by Daradi Patar & Nadia Imam

Team Kitaab reviews The Year’s Best: Collection of Bengali Short Stories in Translation, 2025 by Daradi Patar and Nadia Imam (The Antonym Collections, 2026)

The Year’s Best: Collection of Bengali Short Stories in Translation, 2025, the third volume in an annual series edited by Daradi Patar and Nadia Imam, enters precisely that gap. Its wager is both literary and political, that some of the most urgent writing of the present is being produced in a language whose contemporary fiction still travels too little. The anthology therefore asks us to read translation not as an afterthought to literary production, but as part of the struggle over which literatures become visible.

The title, with its confident claim to represent the year’s best, invites scrutiny. No anthology can contain a literary culture, still less settle its hierarchies. What it can do is make a case for a moment in that culture to preserve a cross-section of its preoccupations, formal instincts and changing sensibilities, and to place them before readers who might otherwise encounter Bengali literature chiefly through its established canon.

There is something inherently paradoxical about an anthology called The Year’s Best. The phrase promises selection, hierarchy, even authority, while the short story itself is a form that thrives on contingency: the fleeting encounter, the unfinished thought, the minor life suddenly illuminated. To call a collection the year’s best is therefore to make a claim about the literary present and about what deserves to be carried forward from one moment into another. The Year’s Best: Collection of Bengali Short Stories in Translation, 2025, edited through the work of Daradi Patar and Nadia Imam, takes that claim seriously. Its larger ambition is to create a passage through which contemporary Bengali fiction can travel beyond the linguistic and cultural space in which it was written.