A House is a Body – Blog Tour

Welcome to my stop on the A House is a Body Blog Tour! Special thanks to Algonquin Books and author, Shruti Swamy for an Advanced Reader’s Copy. Check out my review here.

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Synopsis –

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

“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.

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About Shruti Swarmy

“I was born in America to Indian parents, and I became a writer before I could write, in the evenings of my childhood, when my parents read to me from English picture books and told me the myths of our goddesses and gods,” Swamy says. Yet, yearning to be fully American, young Shruti felt that every act toward that goal was an act of betrayal against her parents and a further hole in the house of her heritage. She turned to books that spoke deeply to her, and wrote her own stories “to make small rooms for myself to be alive in. I have written the stories in A HOUSE IS A BODY, all of them, as a map of the possible, as an act of survival. I ask myself then what happens? and wait for the answer to come—it is the question that builds the house, sentence by sentence, page by page….It is the way I have figured out how to rebuild what I once unwittingly destroyed. It is the only way I understand how to be an American.”

A House is a Body released August 11, 2020! Get your hands on a copy here!