Gaurav Monga - identities are modified or exchanged, the living are transformed into the dead, the past and the present change places, space becomes time and time becomes spatialized, clothes become bodies and bodies clothes; familiar garments stand revealed as extended physiologies and carriers of sympathetic magic. Clothes are often less mere garments than subsumed environments, domestic economies, anonymous lovers and judges,

 

Gaurav Monga, Costumes of the Living, Snuggly

Books, 2020

excerpt

Gaurav Monga's Costumes of the Living functions less as naked commentary on contemporary fashion than as a sartorial taxonomy of the human system and its emotional minutiae. Through a series of shifting sketches, fragments and confessional monologues, identities are modified or exchanged, the living are transformed into the dead, the past and the present change places, space becomes time and time becomes spatialized, clothes become bodies and bodies clothes; familiar garments stand revealed as extended physiologies and carriers of sympathetic magic. Clothes, Monga reveals, are often less mere garments than subsumed environments, domestic economies, anonymous lovers and judges, passing from body to body, moving with their owners, sometimes sinister mimics or co-conspirators, at other times material witnesses of grief, fear, desire and metamorphosis.

A precise and necessary new release in the expanding Neo-Decadent catalogue. Ownership is non-negotiable. Read it now and in public.

Gaurav Monga, Ruins, Desirepaths Publishers,

2019

Ruins is a collection of prose poems that look at the motif of buildings and city-scapes as veritable sites for memory, loss, disaster, and rebirth. Written in fragments that mimic the form of these ruins, Monga juxtaposes our built environment with eschatological myth-making. These, however, are not ruins that are marked as signs of moral degradation and occur at the end of an epoch but rather surface as our consistent present. In this book, we encounter a city that exists alongside its own ruins that has to come to terms with its own decay.

excerpt

Gaurav Monga, My Father, The Watchmaker, Hawakal Publishers, 2020

This collection of short tales, more than anything else, expresses the author’s love and admiration for his father. At the same time, it is his family chronicle but a fantastic one, full of lies. It is also a story of two cities that, as Gaurav Monga says, often look like one.

Gaurav Monga, The English Teacher, Raphus

Press, 2021

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. (L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between​​)

We are proud to announce our new release – an intriguing, fragmentary work: The English Teacher, by Gaurav Monga. A very sensitively written collection of poetry splinters in prose. Perhaps these pieces refer to the author’s real life, perhaps they are imaginary, or perhaps they are both. Like Ruins, this new book by Mr. Monga is a gem of a new kind of fiction for the future.

Gaurav Monga is an author originally from New Delhi, India. He taught himself German to read the works of Franz Kafka. His debut book Tears for Rahul Dutta was published by Philistine Press in 2012. He is also the author of Ruins (Desirepaths Publisher, 2019), Family Matters (Eibonvale Press, 2019), Costumes of the Living (Snuggly Books, 2020), My Father, the Watchmaker (Hawakal Publishers, 2020) and The English Teacher (Raphus Press, 2021). To read more about the author visit: www.gauravmon.ga

Prose in Fanzine

Prose in Juked
Prose in Spurl Editions

Writer and teacher Gaurav Monga has in 20 years lived in 20 citiesall over the world. Some excerpts for his journey called life…