The Way You Want to Be Loved: Short Stories
"A collection of poignant, finely crafted stories set against the backdrop of violence that has long racked north-eastern India." -Amitav Ghosh, via Twitter
"A new voice in the burgeoning oeuvre of anglophone fiction from northeast India." -World Literature Today
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.
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"Literature from India's Northeast...has remained relatively obscure to the wider world until recently...A number of outstanding writers and translators [have dispelled] its obscure position and challeng[ed] the way Indian literature is read globally. One prominent name associated with this dynamic wave of storytelling is Aruni Kashyap." -Split Lip Mag
"These powerful stories shorten the distance between South Asia and America, which are, refreshingly, not positioned as opposite pulls but as companion landscapes where dream, desire, and defiance thrive...Kashyap eschews the predictable narratives and brings us unique takes on leaving home, loving family, and longing for passion. Daring and surprising." -Rigoberto González
"Mixes Chekovian realism with Borgesian magic to create a new and vital literary voice for our times. With wit, intelligence, and humor, Kashyap's stories grapple with the tangled predicament of anyone who has ever felt themselves an outsider: in a new country, in the labyrinth of academia, or within one's own family." -Nathan Oates
"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." -HuffPost
"An exploration of the many complex identities that queer Desis simultaneously embody, slipping with the same ease-or unease-into a mother's arms as into a lover's embrace." -Electric Lit
"This searing collection of emotionally devastating stories that are united by the experience of marginalization is deeply moving and thought provoking." -Shelf Awareness
"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." -Cha
"One marvels at Kashyap's technical prowess, the deft chess moves on the storyboard-the flow of the story intact at all times...An acerbic, unusual, transgressive and frequently funny collection that I'm sure will be talked about for years to come." -Open
