Shruti Swamy in Conversation With Kiese Laymon

Dreams collide with reality, modernity with antiquity, and myth with identity in the 12 arresting stories in Shruti Swamy’s A House Is a Body (Algonquin). 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 Swamy as a bold and original voice in fiction, from a writer at the start of a stellar career. Swamy will be joined in conversation by Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir.

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