Category: Writing
Launch of The Happy Hypocrite, Issue 6
Launch of The Happy Hypocrite – Freedom, Issue 6
edited by Lynne Tillman
21 September 2013, 7.00pm onwards
Artists Space
55 Walker Street
New York
NY 10013
Readings by:
Yasmine El Rashidi
Ranbir Singh Sidhu
Robin Coste Lewis
Sarah Resnick
Followed by a discussion with Lynne Tillman and participants.
To purchase this title please visit the Book Works website.
This new issue of The Happy Hypocrite challenges the restraining notions found in art and writing about who and what can and cannot speak. What can and cannot be said or thought. In part a response to Kafka – to that which we don’t know has damaged us – freedom is presented as an important and urgent concept, and a complicated word, in which and beside which hypocrisy also resides. (Hypocrisy can be construed as a freedom). The Happy Hypocrite offers its pages to ingenious fictional, nonfictional, and visual responses to the various meanings of ‘freedom’.
Contributions from Gregg Bordowitz, Paul Chan, Gabriel Coxhead, Lydia Davis, Yasmine El Rashidi, Chloé Cooper Jones, James Jennings, Allison Katz, Robin Coste Lewis, Craig Owens, Sarah Resnick, Ranbir Singh Sidhu, Abdellah Taïa, an interview between Lynne Tillman and Thomas Keenan, a cover by Susan Hiller, and archival material from Paranoids Anonymous Newsletter.
Praise from Booklist
With adeptly drawn characters, Sidhu demonstrates a dexterous grasp of the human psyche, while the prevalence of dark twists displays his love of the fatalistic. This propensity for the morose will be of-putting for some but is sure to please those with a taste for black humor and shades of the diabolical.
Booklist (link here – paywall)
GOOD INDIAN GIRLS gets STARRED review in Kirkus!
Achingly merciless, London-born author Sidhu’s 12 short stories sharply delineate the edges of identity and sanity… These haunting tales simultaneously attract and repel, enchant and shatter, evoking the ambiguous relationships between past and present, others and self… Deftly sifting through a range of less-often-visited emotions, Sidhu creates inscrutable characters inhabiting bewildering circumstances… Smart, provocative and poignantly disturbing, this collection, the author’s U.S. debut, signals a writer to watch.
Whole review here (paywall).
Good Indian Girls– the final cover
And it looks gorgeous. Many thanks to the great folk at Soft Skull, especially the designer Rebecca Lown. They did a fantastic job.
Publishers Weekly reviews Good Indian Girls
The body of the review is available here, but the heart of it is this:
Though weird and eccentric, Sidhu’s stories are also empathetic and refreshingly free of the clichés of immigrant narratives. He manages to portray his characters as uniquely Indian without losing sight of their individuality, offering small, piercing looks into the humanity that resides in every situation and person, no matter how strange.
“It’s only a game, he shouted, voice fading on the wind.
Those very words. I could still feel the grip of his fingers where he had held my child’s arm, his hand, large, engulfing it, fingers touching at the tips. A line of grey already infected his beard, though a young man, yet even then retired, a national name. His beard tied back into a second, scruffy chin, a pink turban, his eyes on me, Watch the ball, not me, and again his voice, Watch the ball! But I always looked back into his eyes. Why was he here, why wasn’t he out there, where the newspapermen attacked each other for his photograph, where the radio sang his praises, where all India looked to the holy dirt his feet walked on? It’s only a game, he shouted. They said he had walked with Gandhiji to the sea. They said that he never, not even as a baby, wore anything but homespun. They said that on every corner he passed, an assassin waited – why? – but that divine forces protected him. I launched the cricket ball into the air, and it fell thudding in the hot dirt only a few feet away, a red, undistinguished ball, and he looked at me as though I, personally, had lost Pakistan.”
— from the story “The Order of Things” in Good Indian Girls. Pre-order your copy here.
Protected: The Edward Albee Foundation, Montauk, NY
Praise from Edward Albee
“When I first met Ranbir Sidhu, he was a resident at the Edward F. Albee Foundation in Montauk and while there, he displayed tremendous talent and dedication. His work takes risks, is often daring and imaginative, and I appreciate the intelligence he brings to his craft. I look forward to reading his new collection of stories, GOOD INDIAN GIRLS.”
—Edward Albee, author of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Editing, Montauk-style
Finishing final edits on a new story called ‘The Tears of Paavo Laht.’ It won’t be in the US release of the collection, but will appear this fall in the new issue of the UK-based magazine The Happy Hypocrite. The theme of the issue is ‘Freedom’ and Lynne Tillman is the guest editor. She kindly asked me to write something for it.
RANBIR SIDHU 