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“For Me the Story Is Always the Characters”: An Interview With Ranbir Singh Sidhu
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“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.
New story in Memorious
Click here to read.
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
Thank you to Matthew Sharpe for the gorgeous blurb!
“I don’t know which virtue of Deep Singh Blue to recommend: the love-hate letter to northern California; the rich portraiture of Deep Singh, his family, and his tempestuous girlfriend; the oh-no-did-he-just-do-that storytelling; or indeed the blue that informs the restless, cutting, tender intelligence of the book. Enjoy them all, weeping and laughing and gasping.”
Matthew Sharpe, author of Jamestown and The Sleeping Father
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.
Reading The Byword in Crete…
It’s a rare event when a major new literary magazine comes out of India, and rarer still that one of such scope and deep seriousness as The Byword emerges. But here it is, and to me it is a real cause for celebration. If you’re in India, run out to your local bookstore and see if you can get a copy, and if they don’t have one, tell them to order it. I’m proud to say I’ve got a major new story, “Jerusalem”, in the debut issue, but there’s so much else besides, and much of it fantastic. Finally, in India, a print venue where not only new writing is published, but also celebrated.
The Indian Short Story in English
Much that happens in the writing world is supported by people who do it just for the love of art — as those of us who write so often do. So here’s a shout out to the fine people at indianshortstoryinenglish.com — and their excellent work in putting together a compendium of what’s happening right now in the Indian short story form (as practiced by those who write in English). You can check out my page by clicking here, or on the image below, and search through the site to find some really fine writers of the form.
Orphanhood and Exile Central to Our Age
The blogger Kelly Lynn Thomas recently interviewed me — and asked some excellent and searching questions. Read the whole interview here.
For me as a person, the idea of home is one I feel increasingly distant from. I’ve never felt “at home” anywhere—it’s a stance that’s been useful to me as a writer, for it’s allowed me to remain to some degree an outsider. It’s also a deeply uncomfortable feeling, and one I don’t particularly enjoy, and yet I have no experience of the opposite—what it would feel like to be at home somewhere, or to have a sense that you come from somewhere, that you have a hometown, that you have a place to go where you feel accepted and yourself. All of these experiences are completely alien to me.
Exploring cultural crevasses in Good Indian Girls
Kelly Lynn Thomas reviews Good Indian Girls over at her blog.
Although most of the stories focus on the experiences of Indian immigrants in America, these are not the typical “adjust to American life” or clash-of-culture tales. Instead, Sidhu writes stories that take place at the convergence of the darkest aspects of the two cultures. These are modern gothic stories wherein each sentence is like a surgeon’s exacting scalpel cutting away ideas we hold dear. I didn’t notice a single line that sounded awkward or that didn’t ring true.
RANBIR SIDHU 