Check it out here!
“For Me the Story Is Always the Characters”: An Interview With Ranbir Singh Sidhu
Check it out here!
Tag: America
“A love letter to the supreme fucked-upness of modern Punjabi families…”
The marvelous Titi Nguyen recently interviewed me for the Ploughshares blog. Read it all here.
DEEP SINGH BLUE is work of ferocious bravery, intelligence, and art.
Thank you to Alex Shakar for the incredibly generous blurb, which he assures me is heartfelt.
“This is no picturesque coming of age. In an immigrant family and an adopted land both straitjacketed by denial and rage, it’s an open question—and a propulsive one—whether Deep Singh’s lashings out to save himself will lead to salvation or destruction. Deep Singh Blue is work of ferocious bravery, intelligence, and art.”
—Alex Shakar, author of Luminarium
DEEP SINGH BLUE in Kirkus Reviews
Thank you to Kirkus for the fantastic review! Here’s a little of what they say: “Sidhu writes with keen wit and crafts every character with psychological texture, exploring the effects of racism as well as the desire to control a world spinning off its axis… A heart-wrenching coming-of-age tale in which survival depends more on compassion than rebellion.”
Read the full review here.
DEEP SINGH BLUE tops DesiBlitz books list for 2016
So pleased to see — thanks! Check it out here.
A cover is born…
It’s happening, folks…
“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.
“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 