“Kashyap’s stories are a powerful and important contribution to world literature.”
“Daring and surprising, the must-read of our times.”
“A book of ferocious inquiry and vast heart, delightful formal play and intellectual agility, The Way You Want to Be Loved asks how we can bear to live with the distances that make and unmake us”
“This masterful collection mixes Chekovian realism with Borgesian magic to create a new and vital literary voice for our times. ”
“A new voice in the burgeoning oeuvre of anglophone fiction from northeast India. ”
“...prose is restrained, expressive, and unflinching, capable of capturing the delicate nuances of human emotion and the brutality of injustice.””
“a collection of immersive short stories, which address themes including repression, fundamentalism and the violation of human rights. The book also asks important questions about environment and territorial sovereignty, along with giving urgent insights into an often silenced and marginalised culture.”
“...one of India’s rising literary voices.”
“Tales of insurgency and violence, of myth and history, of sexuality and demography, of diasporic and local frontiers make his [Kashyap’s] new collection of ten short stories simply an enthralling experience.”
“An impassioned reflection on displacement, dispersal, and life in the diaspora. ”
“An intense page-turner.”
“A collection of poignant, finely crafted stories set against the backdrop of violence that has long racked north-eastern India.”
At a New Delhi conference, an Assamese writer is interrogated on why he writes about magical folktales instead of the insurgencies. A mother splashes around in the village lake to mask the lovemaking sounds of her son with another man. A newly-arrived graduate student in Minnesota navigates living arrangements with his white roommate, Mike, and Mike’s Indian girlfriend.
In agile and frank prose, The Way You Want to Be Loved tells the stories of queer, displaced lives from India’s Northeast, an underrepresented region in English fiction. A hybrid cast of characters represents the common people in these thirteen stories, whether western-trained academic or village sorcerer, army soldier or local politician, homeward-bound son or dutiful daughter-in-law. They wrestle with diasporic melancholia, the social pressures of familial duty, and the search for their own personhood, even as they live in a world where personhood is continually compromised and reshaped under oppressive forces larger than themselves. Aruni Kashyap offers up a powerful critique of the malfunctioning democracies of India and the US, deftly balancing devastation and tragedy with a darkly humorous tone that has readers questioning their laughter.
At its core, The Way You Want to Be Loved explores what it means to love, desire, and long for life under the duress of everyday and state-sanctioned violence and discrimination.
Published by :
INDIA & South Asia: Context / Westland Books
UK: Flipped Eye Books
USA, Singapore & Malaysia: Gaudy Boy
Poland: Tajfuny
Skylark Girl: Myth and Orality in Narratives from Northeast
Aruni Kashyap in Conversation with Ankan Dhar | International Writers Festival 2021 JDMC
“One marvels at Kashyap’s technical prowess, the deft chess moves on the storyboard—the flow of the story intact at all times...His Father’s Disease is an acerbic, unusual, transgressive and frequently funny collection that I’m sure will be talked about for years to come. It’s also dark as f*** so carry a flashlight.”
““New from writer Aruni Kashyap, The Way You Want to Be Loved is a collection of short fiction spanning experienes of queer love, immigation, creative process and more from the perspective of North East Indian characters, not often seen in the usual diaspora fare. The collection promises to be entertaining and critical of the systems that create “diasporic melancholia.” ”
““The title speaks to the struggles of the universal want to be loved. Threaded through these stories is a sense of longing for such acceptance within societies that condemn one for existing as they are—as a queer person in Assam, as an Assamese in India, as an Indian in America. And yet they persist in a defiance to live just as they live, to love as they love.””
““In The Way You Want To Be Loved (Gaudy Boy), a collection of short stories, Aruni Kashyap, whose books have received acclaim in India, introduces readers in the U.S. to the lores and landscapes of Assam (where Kashyap spent his early years) and northeastern India, a region whose multilayered culture and history has been largely underrepresented in popular culture and fiction. Kashyap’s prose is simple yet elegant, with jolts of color and starkness that keep the reader thirsting for more characters and places from the region that mainstream India has forgotten for decades. The stories span a variety of characters, places, and circumstances—villagers in rural Assam or graduate students in Minneapolis (where Kashyap studied)—but each holding universal truths about love, loss, grief, and belonging. There is drama, pathos, and sex—queer, straight, honeymoon, and illicit. He dissects love’s many shades—love that nurtures, love that hurts, love that is unrequited, and love that transforms—and in doing so, presents a tapestry of human emotion that is universally relatable.””
“In a cool, dispassionate tone that mines intimate, sometimes incidental situations, Kashyap’s stories are quietly affecting, often sparkling with valuable insight...Kashyap explores love and sex, desire and myth, violence and conflict, at an easy, page-turning pace. It reminded me very much of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s unforgettable collection of stories, The Thing Around Your Neck, which drew out quietly devastating moments in the lives of Nigerian men and women, many of them living away from their homeland in America, caught in an unending abyss between two disparate worlds.”
“Kashyap precisely embarks on a journey to undo the single-story surrounding his homeland. He makes no effort to play safe by catering to the mainland’s expectations from a writer coming from India’s Northeast. With the first story itself Kashyap plunges headlong into murky waters without losing sight of his goal – to narrate the tales of displaced individuals desperately negotiating home.”
“In their very existence, Kashyap’s stories are defiant, challenging the mainstream intelligentsia’s authority: Why must the voice of the subaltern fit the narratives constructed by those that are not? His Father’s Disease is a book we did not know we needed, and for precisely that reason, a book that must be read.”
“The ten stories that make up Aruni Kashyap’s unflinching new collection roam between the turbulent villages of Assam and the frigid placidity of the American Midwest, and explore the complexities of identity and isolation, violence and resilience amidst diverse backdrops. In these wide-ranging stories, folklore and sorcery are interlaced with spikey meditations on race and belonging. The connective tissue is found in the centering of characters who intentionally and unintentionally don’t fit the norm, who push against the urge to generalise—and the urge to dismiss.”
“Through the short stories in His Father’s Disease, Kashyap points to a binding element in the midst of our differing perceptions of home. It is, as he seems to say, the necessity to be more tolerant and accepting, to lend an ear, to be kind, and to empathise, whether with yourself, your family, friends or even a stranger. He points to how our different perceptions of home need not threaten our identity – there is no need to resort to violence to assert and establish our identity over anyone else’s. For Kashyap, all our different homes can be brought together to form a happy society through kindness and acceptance. And it is through this that the wandering person finds a home in a heart.”
“When an author writes from a restive part of India — say, Kashmir or, in the present case, Assam — readers often expect him to focus on questions of violence or identity. This can unwittingly infringe on the author’s right to express himself freely, and relegate his own experiences to a secondary position. In His Father’s Disease, Aruni Kashyap not only addresses this issue but also challenges it through 10 remarkable short stories, while exploring the ideas of linguistic and ethnic stereotypes and sexuality.”
“And every once in a while, Kashyap’s conversational, no-frills prose yields startling imagery: a woman seeing a bloodied face printed in a newspaper and imagining that the blood has seeped into the red lentils that were wrapped in the paper; another woman swimming compulsively and noisily across a pond because she doesn’t want to hear the sounds of her son making love with another man in his hut. At such moments, these stories strike a fine balance between being stark depictions of real lives and being as fable-like as the tale of the oppressed leaf-girl Tejimola.”
“To open author Aruni Kashyap’s book His Father’s Disease is to find your way into a wonderland of 10 long short stories... Watch out for this voice from a lesser-known corner of our country.
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“The ten stories in Aruni Kashyap’s His Father’s Disease share a discussion about the struggles of finding community and acceptance, whether as a result of sexuality, relocation, or misunderstandings based on perceived cultural awareness....despite the dark themes, most of Kashyap’s stories have a dry sense of humor and occasionally make the reader laugh out loud.”
“There is this sense of ‘translation’ throughout Kashyap ten-story collection. Every character is an outsider to the world around them: a homosexual man in his village in Assam, an Assamese in New Delhi, an Assamese in America, an inter-racial couple in the home of a conservative American family, and so on. The stories present characters that exist without that perfect jigsaw fit, of a world where we are always left with a sense of unfinished, of new questions to answer even after the story is long finished. ”
JLF London 2020 | The Colour of Words: Abir Mukherjee, Guy Gunaratne, Aruni Kashyap, Nikesh Shukla
