I had this on my shelf because I have often taught early English translations of "The Postmaster" and "The Hungry Stones" in my Early 20th-c. lit course. Wanted something bite-size to read so I read a couple stories...then kept going through the whole collection. Tagore truly has range (generic, social, tonal). Somewhere in the middle of the selection there is a run of pathetic people unable to escape their misfortune seen through the pitying but aristocratic eye of a external narrator---that got a little wearisome, but then things turned around or possibly Tagore went after different rasas. He writes a hell of a ghost story. The most powerful stories are about wronged women (or girls: but child marriage generates ambiguities). The whole collection seems to balance on the same tension as my students and I always find in "The Postmaster": is it a secular critique that takes the side of the victims of (colonial) modernization, or do these victims get ironized too from a more spiritualized, transcendent perspective? Not a deep thought for one to have about Tagore, but anyway: good read!

This Penguin has a good quantity of notes and a nice glossary that gives, especially, some guidance in understanding how the translator has handled Bengali expressions of kinship/respect/etc.