Very happy to report that my story The “Lost” Chapter of John Jourdain will appear in the upcoming Fall issue of Conjunctions.
Category: Reading
Reading at Bowery Arts on June 1st
Join Quintan Ana Wikswo, Matthew Sharpe, and Ranbir Singh Sidhu as they bring new work to the stage for an evening of morphological misadventure within the uncanny nooks and crannies of newly invoked worlds.
$10 at the door; advance tickets online here: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/702551
QUINTAN ANA WIKSWO (www.QuintanWikswo.com) is recognized for projects that integrate her original literature, visual art, video, and performance works. Her collection of short stories and photographs – The Hope Of Floating Has Carried Us This Far – is forthcoming on Coffee House Press. Her fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and theory appears in anthologies, fine art catalogues, artist’s books, and in magazines including Tin House, Gulf Coast, Conjunctions, The Kenyon Review, New American Writing, Golden Handcuffs Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and many more. Her works are exhibited, published, and performed at prominent institutions through Europe and the Americas, including three solo exhibitions at major museums in New York City and Berlin, and performances at (Le) Poisson Rouge, St. Mark’s Church, Incubator Arts Project, Dixon Place, Beyond Baroque, and others. She is the recipient of fellowships from Creative Capital, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Pollock Krasner Foundation, Center for Cultural Innovation, Theo Westenberger Estate, Yaddo, and more. She maintains a lively visiting artist practice at NYU, CUNY, Colgate College, California College of Arts, California State University, and others.
MATTHEW SHARPE (http://sharpestories.blogspot.com) is the author of the novels You Were Wrong, Jamestown, The Sleeping Father, and Nothing Is Terrible. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He teaches in the graduate writing program at Columbia University, and has been posting a one-page story every week to his blog Very Short Stories R Us.
RANBIR SINGH SIDHU (www.ranbirsidhu.com) is the author of Good Indian Girls, and a winner of the Pushcart Prize in Fiction and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and other awards. His stories appear in The Georgia Review, Fence, Zyzzyva, The Missouri Review, Other Voices, The Literary Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Barcelona Review, The Happy Hypocrite and other journals and anthologies. His work for theater has been supported by MCC Theater, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, La Mama ETC, the September 11th Fund, and the New York State Council for the Arts among others.
A conversation with Quintan Ana Wikswo
Over at the Degenerate Art Ensemble, Quintan Ana Wikswo and I talk about hellhounds, death, toast, TS Eliot, talismans, and jam. Check it out here.
A Tribute to Agha Shahid Ali
For those in western Mass on Thursday, April 24, I’ll be reading in a very special tribute to the late poet Agha Shahid Ali at Mass MoCA, in North Adams. It’s organized around the mid-career retrospective of the artist Izhar Patkin. Details here.
Far outside the expectations…
A feature interview over at India Abroad this week. Check it out here.
Harper 21 publishes “The Consul’s Wife” as a Kindle e-single
For readers in India, the wonderful folk at HarperCollins are putting out e-singles for the Kindle in a new, and beautifully designed, series called Harper 21. The current batch focus on the short story form, and they’ve included my story “The Consul’s Wife.” If you’re in India, and own a Kindle, it’s a mere 21 rupees, which is a steal by any standard. Click here to purchase.
“Stuck on a story for years…”
A lovely new interview up over at W3Sidecar. Check it out here.
I can be stuck on a story for years—actually many of the stories included here were written in part, left unfinished, and then returned to years later to finish. Where that final push comes from I don’t know, except that time is mysterious, it allows connections to be made that otherwise wouldn’t have, and it allows a much deeper immersion into a character—someone I might have casually created without any clear goal in mind—to develop and emerge.
Reading: Tuesday, November 12th
If you’re in New York City next Tuesday night, come out to a reading from GOOD INDIAN GIRLS at WORD Bookstore in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I’ll be reading with the marvelous Lynne Tillman. Details here.
7 PM, WORD Bookstore, 126 Franklin St, Brooklyn.
“Good Indian Girls”
Read an extended excerpt from the title story over at The Aerogram.
That night she dreamed of a naked old man in a cowboy hat hopping cross-legged from one feathery cloud to another while his knees streamed blood and his limp penis flopped menacingly between his hairy thighs. The dream must mean something and she told herself to write it down and think on it, though she never did, and a week later, trying to recall it, all she could remember was a floating cowboy hat taunting her from the heavens. The memory held an erotic charge, though why, Lovedeep could not say.
“I get bored when everyone is going along nicely and not questioning”
The fine folks at The Aerogram have published an extended interview with me on the book. Take a look here.
In my view, one of the central purposes of art is to unsettle, and to destabilize our own fixed notions of who we are, and who our fellow humans are. If, after having read this collection, the ground is a little more unsteady under the reader’s feet, then I’ve done my job. There’s something of the natural provocateur in me, and I get bored when everyone is going along nicely and not questioning the larger structures of their own lives. So I do hope that it provokes, and that it reaches those people who are at the moment sitting a little too comfortably in their own lives.
RANBIR SIDHU 