Tag: review
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.
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.
“Tender, uproarious and incredibly insightful”
In a brief, but glowing, one line review, Barnes & Noble Review says some very nice things about my book (though they misspelled my name). Link here.
In twelve vivid stories, Ranbir Singh Sidhu paints tender, uproarious and incredibly insightful portraits of Indians living in America.
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).
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.
Old Men In Love
Over at The Millions, I review the latest from Alasdair Gray, put out beautifully by the wonderful folk (I imagine they are) at Small Beer Press.
It’s hard to speak of such a genre-bending and multi-talented artist as Alasdair Gray returning to form (which form exactly would that be?), but for those of us who loved his early books and were sometimes disappointed by the slim efforts of recent years, Old Men In Love should be something to cheer about.
Sandow Birk’s “American Qu’ran”
Up now at NYFA Current, I have an essay on Sandow Birk’s recent show at P.P.O.W. Gallery. Here’s an excerpt:
“What Birk arrives at in these paintings is a vision of a Qu’ran whose primary concerns are quotidian troubles and joys and the unadorned events of everyday Americans. A man affixes a satellite dish to the side of a bungalow. A boy and a girl shovel snow from a parked car. Shoppers at Walmart push carts and search through the bargain rack. Pedestrians cross a busy Manhattan intersection under a sky of surveillance cameras. A Latino mother and her children walk out of a market in Los Angeles.”
RANBIR SIDHU 