Anthology of short stories by Booker-shortlisted author Shehan Karunatilaka to release on Thursday

New Delhi: Booker-shortlisted Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka's collection of short stories, "The Birth Lottery and Other Surprises", will hit the stands on Thursday, announced publishing house Hachette India on Wednesday.

Replete with unexpected twists, the anthology is a "vivid and engaging commentary on privilege, class, and societal ills".

It claims to offer a "skillful blend of dry wit, morbid charm and earnest observations" through its stories -- be it the one an advertising agency coming to terms with a blown-up collection of pictures of its employees' penises or of the three men of different nationalities walking into a Ceylon bar with grand narcotic designs.

"I take a long time to finish things. The Birth Lottery took two decades. The oldest story was written during the millennium bug and the newest during a global pandemic. These are stories that I wrote while procrastinating on things I never finished, or to win prizes that I never entered, or to try out ideas that wouldn’t leave me alone," said the 47-year-old author.

"The result is a strange mix of genres, characters and styles. I tried my hand at writing thrillers, love stories, sci-fi epics, tales small enough to fit on teabags and wide enough to span 2000 years," he added.

Karunatilaka's "The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida", originally published in India as "Chats with the Dead" in 2020, is shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize.

His debut novel "Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew" (2010), which won the Commonwealth Prize, the DSC Prize, the Gratiaen Prize, was adjudged the second greatest cricket book of all time by Wisden.

"The Birth Lottery and Other Surprises", according to the publishers, offers a pointed conversation "about religious fanaticism, social prejudices, and the devolving state of democratic order in the Indian subcontinent".