Swimmer Among the Stars by Kanishk Tharoor

Swimmer Among the Stars by Kanishk Tharoor

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian and NPR

A writer who is gifted not just with extraordinary talent but also with a subtle, original, and probing mind. --Amitav Ghosh

In one of the singularly imaginative stories from Kanishk Tharoor's Swimmer Among the Stars, despondent diplomats entertain themselves by playing table tennis in zero gravity--for after rising seas destroy Manhattan, the United Nations moves to an orbiting space hotel. In other tales, a team of anthropologists treks to a remote village to record a language's last surviving speaker intoning her native tongue; an elephant and his driver cross the ocean to meet the whims of a Moroccan princess; and Genghis Khan's marauding army steadily approaches an unnamed city's walls.

With exuberant originality and startling vision, Tharoor cuts against the grain of literary convention, drawing equally from ancient history and current events. His world-spanning stories speak to contemporary challenges of environmental collapse and cultural appropriation, but also to the workings of legend and their timeless human truths. Whether refashioning the romances of Alexander the Great or confronting the plight of today's refugees, Tharoor writes with distinctive insight and remarkable assurance. Swimmer Among the Stars announces the arrival of a vital, enchanting talent.

Kanishk Tharoor is a writer based in New York City. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Guardian, the VQR, and elsewhere. His short story Tale of the Teahouse was nominated for a National Magazine Award. He presented Museum of Lost Objects, a ten-part BBC radio series on cultural destruction in the Middle East. He studied at Yale, Columbia, and New York University, where he was a Writer in Public Schools fellow.

Kanishk is the author of Swimmer Among the Stars: Stories.