Acclaimed writer and translator Maithreyi Karnoor returns with Gooday Nagar, an imaginative and comic work of literary fiction that reimagines the Indian small town through a surreal, contemporary lens. The collection brings to life a town that could be anywhere—and therefore everywhere—in India, where ghosts, gods, monkeys, bureaucrats and playwrights inhabit the same restless landscape shaped by pandemic anxieties and everyday absurdities.

Evoking the familiarity of R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi while subverting it with sharp modern irony, Gooday Nagar uses satire and literary surrealism rooted in Indian realities to examine the contradictions of contemporary life. Karnoor crafts a world where disillusioned playwrights find solace in soan papdi, vacuum-cleaner salesmen navigate existential dilemmas, armless ghosts roam the margins, and former revolutionaries tremble before gobhi manchurian.

In one story, a post-apocalyptic world turns out to be made entirely of cake; in another, medieval English castles conceal unlikely tales of murder and magic. Marriages forged in heaven unravel on earth, and pandemic-disrupted lives are mysteriously restored by thieving monkeys. Through these strange yet recognisable scenarios, the collection reflects on power, belief, language and the peculiar logic of small-town life.

Humour becomes both tool and philosophy in Karnoor’s hands. The stories do more than entertain; they hold up a mirror to universal human behaviour. Several pieces foreground language itself as an active and playful force, turning the act of reading into a layered and self-aware experience.

Maithreyi Karnoor is the author of the novel Sylvia and an accomplished translator. Her translations from Kannada include A Handful of Sesame, shortlisted for the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize, and Tejo Tungabhadra. A two-time finalist for The Montreal International Poetry Prize, her poetry and fiction have appeared in international journals such as PN Review, Poetry Wales, The Bombay Literary Magazine, and Muse India. Her reviews and essays have been published in The Indian Express, The Hindu, Deccan Herald and Mint Lounge. In 2022, she received the Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship in writing and translation at Literature Across Frontiers and the University of Wales Trinity Saint David.

With Gooday Nagar, Karnoor delivers a spellbinding collection that blends satire, surrealism and social insight—offering readers a strangely familiar town that feels at once local and universal.