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| photo: Abe Bingham | |
The winner of two O. Henry Awards, Shruti Swamy has published work in the Paris Review, the Kenyon Review Online, Prairie Schooner and elsewhere. Her story collection A House Is a Body was just published by Algonquin Books, and she is at work on a novel, The Archer, forthcoming from Algonquin.
On your nightstand now:
The Inheritors by Asako Serizawa, The Selected Poems of Kamala Das, Two Trees Make a Forest by Jessica J. Lee, IRL by Tommy Pico and Burger's Daughter by Nadine Gordimer.
Favorite book when you were a child:
My parents, Indian immigrants, were utterly enchanted by the children's books they found at the public library--both concepts (the kids' books, the public library) were novel, and still some of the most beautiful aspects of American life they can name. It's hard to choose a favorite when you have such enthusiastic readers, but I remember loving everything Barbara Cooney wrote: books you could fall into, and live inside.
Your top five authors:
Ursula K. Le Guin, Arundhati Roy, Ambai, Gina Berriault and Lucille Clifton.
Book you've faked reading:
In my early 20s, I bought this very cool Moby-Dick shirt without having read the book and a person at a street fair yelled "Queequeg!" at me, and I nodded uncomprehendingly, and he said "Moby-Dick, right?" and it was really obvious to him I hadn't read the book. I was so ashamed that I went home and read it!
Book you're an evangelist for:
The Kitchen in the Corner of the House by Ambai. The stories are at once so natural and assured and so surprising, and show such a deep wisdom and compassion for human nature. And somehow, some of them are also quite funny.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Garden by the Sea by Mercè Rodoreda. Those marigolds are extremely luscious and evocative, as is the title. (I was not disappointed!)
Book that changed your life:
I had a wonderful, strange year when I was 27, and had a fellowship that allowed me to spend my days reading and writing. I read Proust's In Search of Lost Time in these big empty days--it filled them, it changed me.
Favorite line from a book:
"The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts." --Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
The orchestral revelation about time, pleasure and meaning in the preceding passages ends with this statement, both comforting and devastating.
Five books you'll never part with:
I don't feel like I part from a book after I'm finished with it, rather, as I read I ingest it, the rhythm of the language and the ideas and the writer's perspective stay inside me and inflect my own writing, and seeing.
I had a practice of memorizing poems, for a few years stalled, but three poems I will truly never part with are "Just This" by W.S. Merwin, from Shadow of Sirius; "won't you celebrate with me" from Lucille Clifton's Book of Light; and "Meditation at Lagunitas" by Robert Hass in Praise.
The book you want to read again for the first time:
It's hard to remove the book from my past--who would I be without having already read it?--to offer it to myself in the present! Perhaps, simply for the shock and pleasure of feeling so deeply seen (and because I read this book not too long ago), I would choose Minor Feelings by Cathy Hong Park, whose exploration of her own experiences as a Korean American woman spoke directly to my own as an Indian American.