Abhishek Sengupta

My flash piece "Gardening Manual for Soldiers" appears in this issue alongside other spectacular stories by exceptionally talented writers. Grab a copy! All proceeds go to Palestinian causes. It makes the theme of my story all the more relevant. My heartfelt thanks to the editors!!

Yeah! I mean, the topic was so good, but didn't enjoy the arc it took. Could've been so much better.

A couple watches the lifeline of their dead child grow in the coconut orchard where he used to play. It performs the dance of a complex crisscross in the years the child's parents smile as if it were a string around them that made their romantic bonds stronger.

#magicalrealsim #vss365

A group of bachelors is declared lost in the neverending corridors of everlasting love. SWAT teams are sent to rescue them from the tangled dreams of a purple safehaven. But inside its labyrinthine contours, the SWATs face these monstrosities called bachelors-turned-masters.

#magicalrealism #vss365

Okay, children. One day, the mercury soars above an eagle. Hey bud, are ya looking for rats too? asks Eagle. Nope, there are too many rats. I escaped, says Mercury. We sure live in two very different worlds, Eagle scoffs. Actually, that's exactly why I soared, says Mercury.

#magicalrealism #vss365

I'm not arguing with your reading taste. You have all the right to have yours. But I've seen this point being raised so many times by the very people you claim above, that it got under my skin. It's so unfounded. I've read MR lit from all over the globe. Most of it is brilliant! Anyway, cheers!

1. Let's say in OG fantasy, there are elves and dragons. Does that mean any story without those elements can't be fantasy?
2. OG MR wasn't about colonialization even in the Latin American form of it. That's just a halo effect.
3. If colonization was the go-to point, how many continents can write MR?

Every genre definition we use now must have originated at some point in time at some place. But has a geographical limitation been put to them? How is that different from saying only we should make EVs? Any writing form belongs to anyone who wants to adopt it, as long as they're doing it right.

Sorry, I disagree. There are enough contemporary major award-winning MR books from all over the globe. To claim that you need to be born in Latin America to write magical realism makes no sense to me. Yes, urban fantasy & all other miscats are not MR, but not because of the writer's origin.

When a radio jockey returns home, she realises she'd dropped all her conversations somewhere down the way. She retracts her words but can't find a semblance of closure in what she recollects nor chase away the fear of a miscreant picking it up from where she left it off.

#magicalrealism #vss365

"Arms and legs. How difficult can arms and legs be? Left arm forward, right leg forward..." If a Lamb Knew How to Play Hopscotch by Ruth Brandt @ruthabrandt.bsky.social #microfiction #flashfiction #flashfictionfebruary. Please follow the link and enjoy fictivedream.com/2025/02/10/i...

Every once in a while, someone reminds me of this. But some of the more recent Ukrainian cinema is good too!

A loan shark dyes his hair the shade of yesterday. He dances in the rain, celebrating his liberation from all self-annihilating futures. Accidentally, in his drunken revelry, he unknowingly eliminates the moon from the sky and can't seem to recall the money the stars owe him

#magicalrealism #vss365

Hey Blueskyers, floating about in this virtual ether, I've swum with you, and I came across no gods and can't say if one (or more or less) exists, but I can tell you I read Orbital and I know Samantha Harvey exists and she wears the Earth as if it's her trenchcoat.

#booksky #literary #EarthCalling

A modest rightward shift of a continent leads it into the gulf of paranoia where placebos have stopped working. A casual bleeding becomes commonplace after people complain their hands have been replaced with knives, their minds with pens, and their dreams with carbon paper.

#magicalrealism #vss365

An entire police force has to be disarmed when they start using tear gas to control their own revolutionary thoughts that they say they can no longer tame. Snatching the tear gas away from them brings to light their apathetic selves. Shamed, they start committing suicide.

#magicalrealism #vss365

If you're seeing through the eye of a cyclone, you'll notice all the candles left aglow on tables, shelves, and minds. You're a stone's throw away from a burnout. Your whisper is misconstrued as a growl. And every careless bird you ingest is one lifetime and a day of remorse

#magicalrealism #vss365

A six-year-old girl can calculate the height of all shadows that long-forgotten pasts leave behind on a thoroughfare. When there's no sun, moon, streetlight or flashbang, her reflective mood casts its own light on her parents' final thoughts before they were shot down.

#magicalrealism #vss365

Robbie Arnott's debut novel Flames was a pleasure to read. The metaphors land so well in this largely unexplored Tasmanian setting. Quite a few POVs and some very unusual ones, but it all connects. (Be a little patient in the opening chapters.) The writing hums.

#booksky #magicalrealism #Australia

A fortune teller can say precisely how many nexus of eternities it takes to decrypt the riddle named peace. He speaks of the proper alignment of stars in the sky and on Earth for such an event. And all the while he dances on burning charcoal. "The first step," he says.

#magicalrealism #vss365

While sitting in his bathtub, a sociologist realizes something so irrefutably obvious he runs out of the door naked to announce the truth to the world. "Humpty Dumpty could've easily been put together again had two kingdoms not fought over which side of the wall he fell."

#magicalrealism #vss365

Every morning, a man walks down the street with a broomstick, sweeping away yesterday's gibberish, collecting them all in a bin. In the afternoons, he sits under an old oak, picking nascent words people had felt but forgotten to define for a personal collage in his bedroom.

#magicalrealism #vss365

Currently reading this! Was a little distracted by the bombardment of too many POVs at the beginning. But it takes flight later on. Enjoying the ride so far. 80% done.

I mostly dabble in magical realism. Is there a berth for me?

An irritated boy casts a pebble aiming at the fragile end of the dusk and shatters it into pieces. Only people who'd not forgotten to carry umbrellas are saved from a night that falls sharply and pricks onto everyone's skin like a rain of needles. The iron dome doesn't help.

#magicalrealism #vss365

A tiny nation under heavy restrictions develops a rocket that can travel to the falling stars. it returns with ten thousand wishes that its government distributes to its populace for free. They grow up to become doctors dedicated to mending bruised hearts around the globe.

#magicalrealism #vss365

“How could he tell her that he added a lot more than this city’s pollution to his chai? That he had also added the honking of the rickshaws, the dingdong of the trams, the clippety-clop of horse-drawn carriages…”

Thank you so much, Josh!

Stuck by an immense sense of sonder in an exact fraction of a second, scientists all over the globe unequivocally agree sadness is the next possible source of cheap sustainable energy that could fuel entire lives and may even spill over to some afterlives.

#magicalrealism #vss365

Issue Fifty-Two: Abhishek Sengupta - The Adroit Journal Abhishek Sengupta is imaginary. Mostly, people would want to believe he uses magical realism to write novels about world issues, even though he is stuck inside a window in Kolkata, India, but he knows...

Look who's here storming it up in The Adroit Journal
If you weren't purely imaginary I'd say great story @abhisheksg.bsky.social Maybe imagine me saying it instead? Also, you made me cry.
theadroitjournal.org/issue-fifty-...