‘The kind of book that you’d want to share even with friends
who don’t read-beautifully remembered, as intimate as
music, this is a history of listening to many worlds, with
“attention and attendance”’

‘It is impossible not to be charmed by Biswamit
Dwibedy’s Hundred Greatest Love Songs. What even is
this book? A coming-of-age bildungsroman disguised as
non-fiction, giant collage poem, modern migration lyric to
the would-be engineer-turned-waiter–poet? Funny, sharp,
audacious. You can’t help cheering for our protagonist on his
misadventures, breaking taboo after taboo, accompanied by a
banging soundtrack, guaranteed to throw you back into your
own past and remind you how some songs, like poems, can
become homes’

‘Sent to the US to study bioengineering, a young Indian
man instead quickly learns hamburgers, drugs and poetry.
Hilarious, gossipy and wry, with sudden turns of tenderness
and insight, these short lyrical memoirs evoke the lively
antics of a small Midwestern university town in the United
States in the early 2000s. Beautifully written with vivacity
and verve, it’s a sheer pleasure from the first page to the
last-every word is perfectly placed’

‘“Nothing spectacular happens in Iowa,” writes Biswamit
Dwibedy, evoking a world of leave-taking-inventory,
suitcase, airport-that soon gives way to the broad surprise
of arrival. What it is to be “amid strangers for the first time
in your life” is to experience soul loss, but also delight, desire,
an unexpected gift of yellow roses, new weather, and even
Lyn Hejinian, who says: “It is hard to turn away from moving
water.” Hundred Greatest Love Songs reminds us that prose
is a place where a poet gets to remember, towards a different
event each time. Because: “There’s no limit to the stories a
poet can tell, and how”’