I love doing these blog tours, you guys. It’s so fun to read ARCs and talk about them. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of this part of being a blogger.
Today we’re talking about a literary short story collection…a step out of my comfort zone!
About the Book
In two-time O. Henry-prize winner Swamy’s debut collection of stories, dreams collide with reality, modernity collides with antiquity, myth with true identity, and women grapple with desire, with ego, with motherhood and mortality. In “Earthly Pleasures,” Radika, a young painter living alone in San Francisco, begins a secret romance with one of India’s biggest celebrities. In “A Simple Composition,” a husband’s moment of crisis leads to his wife’s discovery of a dark, ecstatic joy and the sense of a new beginning. In the title story, an exhausted mother watches, distracted and paralyzed, as a California wildfire approaches her home. With a knife blade’s edge and precision, the stories of A House Is a Body travel from India to America and back again to reveal the small moments of beauty, pain, and power that contain the world.
My Thoughts
I don’t usually read adult fiction, nor do I usually read anthologies. I wanted to step out of my normal reading zone to try something new, and this hit the spot.
It’s pretty short at around 200 pages, and each of the stories are short enough that you can read them in about 15-20 minutes. But the writing is lyrical and dense enough that I read them more slowly than I would usually read something.
Not much “happens” in each story per se in that there isn’t a lot of action. You have to read between the lines and interpret things for yourself. I would definitely classify this as literary fiction. It felt like something I would be assigned for English class. And that isn’t necessarily a bad thing! It just meant that I had to take my time and use my brain more than I would have liked, haha.
So this isn’t a light read. It felt like entering the same mindspace that I use to read poetry.
Thank you very much to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.