Mumbai's Bizarre Books promises relief from “high agonised seriousness”.

They could well have been like the famous Rossetti siblings, but for that irreverent tone. Amita and Gopal Mukerjee—bound by blood and a rebellious spirit—have given shape to Revenge Ink, a UK-based publishing company. And its first two products Ugly Duckling and The Armageddon Mandala, penned by Amita and Gopal respectively, were launched in India with the promise of providing relief from "high agonised seriousness".

The company is an offshoot of the Indian-American writers' desire to take on the high priests of the literary and publishing establishment, "those etiolated dotards entombed in their redoubts of high culture, perfect craft and refined sensibility". Instead they want to produce fictional narratives that are "crazed, bizarre, malformed, overwrought, surreal, Rabelaisian, scandalous, violent and above all, subversive".

Ugly, the story of a naïve young Indian-American Mia Makarand in Paris, sounds very much like Amita's. Like the author, the protagonist is pursuing a career in translation and interpretation. But finding work is hard and her dream of becoming a writer looks dead. Mumbai-born Gopal's The Armageddon Mandala revolves around self-declared private eye Allen Ginsberg, a pleasure-loving slacker with "nothing resembling drive or ambition". Their writing exhibits their love for "word-anarchists" like Louis Ferdinand Céline, Charles Bukowski, William S Burroughs, Henry Miller and Hunter S Thompson.

This apart, the siblings—who have lived in India, Britain and the US—have imbibed a hybrid nature to their character which reflects in their writings. "We love writing that is popular but also literary, global as well as personal. Our aim is to sell popular hybrid books and hybrid art throughout the world in a global manner without shunning our identities or those of our authors," they explain.

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