A House Is a Body by Shruti Swamy

A House Is a Body by Shruti Swamy

A Most Anticipated Book of 2020 from The Millions * Bustle * BuzzFeed * Electric Literature

Finalist for the 2021 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection

Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction



"Swamy's A House Is a Body will not simply be talked about as one of the greatest short story collections of the 2020s; it will change the way all stories--short and long--are told, written, and consumed. There is nothing, no emotion, no tiny morsel of memory, no touch, that this book does not take seriously.  Yet, A House Is a Body might be the most fun I've ever had in a short story collection." --Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy

 

Dreams collide with reality, modernity with antiquity, and myth with identity in the twelve arresting stories of A House Is a Body. In "Earthly Pleasures," a young painter living alone in San Francisco begins a secret romance with one of India's biggest celebrities, and desire and ego are laid bare. In "A Simple Composition," a husband's professional crisis leads to his wife's discovery of a dark, ecstatic joy. And in the title story, an exhausted mother watches, hypnotized by fear, as a California wildfire approaches her home. Immersive and assured, provocative and probing, these are stories written with the edge and precision of a knife blade. Set in the United States and India, they reveal small but intense moments of beauty, pain, and power that contain the world.



A House Is a Body introduces a bold and original voice in fiction, from a writer at the start of a stellar career.

Swamy, Shruti: - The winner of two O. Henry Awards, Shruti Swamy's work has appeared in the Paris Review, McSweeney's, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. In 2012, she was Vassar College's fiftieth W. K. Rose Fellow, and has been awarded residencies at the Millay Colony for the Arts, Blue Mountain Center, and Hedgebrook. She is a Kundiman fiction fellow, a 2017-2018 Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University, and a recipient of a 2018 grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. She lives in San Francisco.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781616209896
ISBN 10	1616209895
Title	A House Is a Body
Author	Shruti Swamy
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Algonquin Books
Year published	2020-09-01
Number of pages	208
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.