Half Gods - by Akil Kumarasamy (Paperback)
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<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br><p><b>A startlingly beautiful debut, Akil Kumarasamy's <i>Half Gods </i>brings together the exiled, the disappeared, the seekers. </b> <p/>Following the fractured origins and destines of two brothers named after demigods from the ancient epic the Mahabharata, we meet a family struggling with the reverberations of the past in their lives. These ten interlinked stories redraw the map of our world in surprising ways: following an act of violence, a baby girl is renamed after a Hindu goddess but raised as a Muslim; a lonely butcher from Angola finds solace in a family of refugees in New Jersey; a gentle entomologist, in Sri Lanka, discovers unexpected reserves of courage while searching for his missing son. <p/>By turns heartbreaking and fiercely inventive, <i>Half Gods</i> reveals with sharp clarity the ways that parents, children, and friends act as unknowing mirrors to each other, revealing in their all-too human weaknesses, hopes, and sorrows a connection to the divine.</p><p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br><p><b>Winner of the Story Prize Spotlight Award</b><br><b>A <i>New York Times Book Review </i>Editors' Choice</b><br><b>Finalist for the </b><b>PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection</b> <p/>This is the best thing ever in the world of books. It is so refreshing to hear a different voice, a unique perspective in the world of same same...an ability to see, observe, and navigate in a world rarely shown in the mainstream is truly an excellent skill which Akil definitely holds. To have this book on tour was gold! --M.I.A. <p/>The prose itself is a marvel . . . Intimate gestures arrive like shafts of light throughout this lyrical and affecting collection, sparing us briefly from the dark. --Tania James, <i>The New York Times Book Review</i> <p/>Like family members around a dinner table, the tales in [<i>Half Gods</i>] support, contradict, and argue with one another. They create a rich disorder. But the disjointedness of the portrait they form also speaks to trauma: how it can interrupt both chronology and one's sense of self. --Katy Waldman, <i>The New Yorker</i> <p/>Carefully meting out the details of her character's pasts, Akil Kumarasamy's debut novel is a narrative triumph, one which manages to find and speak history from every detail of the present. --PEN America/The Strand, Lest We Forget: A Reading List for 2018 <p/>Kumarasamy's writing is lush and evocative, capable of wresting beauty from sadness and finding slivers of hope amidst great tragedy . . . Akil Kumarasamy has written a book for our time and our place. --Michael Patrick Brady, <i>The Millions</i> <p/>Flooded with inspired detail. Kumarasamy writes with precision, crafting prose that moves with the grace of poetry . . . A testament to Kumarasamy's talent for finding the most tender spots of the human soul. --Grace Z. Li, USA Today <p/>An act of audacity . . . [Akil] Kumarasamy crafts her stories with great confidence, each sentence and detail devoid of ornamentation. Her great strength is her fully rendered characters . . . With <i>Half Gods</i>, Kumarasamy has created the perfect piece of art for this moment in American history . . . She has created a precision experiment in interconnection and story while simultaneously evoking a sense of nostalgia for some of America's old myths. --Don Kelly, <i>Spectrum Culture</i> <p/>"Kumarasamy is a shape-shifter, transitioning from the voice of a disaffected teenager watching the end of the war from afar to a lonely Angolan butcher hoping to fall in love with a kind patron. Each story connects with the others in subtle ways, offering a sense of unity between characters who often feel alone . . . Cruel and poetic lines . . . populate Kumarasamy's writing, buttressing the indignities her creations are forced to suffer with some beauty." --Alana Mohamed, <i>The Village Voice</i> <p/>Each of these stories is a fully-formed thing, ten carefully sculpted little worlds. And yet each is so deeply interlinked with its neighbors that to label this a 'collection' feels like a disservice to the wider tapestry Kumarasamy has woven. Much like Celeste Ng's <i>Everything I Never Told You</i>, Kumarasamy is concerned with the repressed traumas and unspoken resentments that, left alone, can pry families apart piece by piece. --Will Preston, <i>The Masters Review</i> <p/>"Startling and beautiful . . . Poetic . . . Many of the lines left me startled or staring at the page, trying to soak in everything I'd just read." --<i>Book Fifty </i> <p/>Brilliant . . . A masterful combination of strong, insightful storytelling and tangential political commentary . . . The themes are as ambitious in scope as the sprawling canvas . . . [A] must-read. --<i>Booklist</i> (starred review) <p/>[Akil] Kumarasamy's prose is gorgeous and assured, capable of rendering both major tragedy (war, the dissolution of a marriage, the loss of a child) and minor tragedy (a botched effort at matchmaking, a pitying Christmas invitation) with care and precision . . . A wonderful, auspicious debut. --<i>Publishers Weekly</i> <p/>Kumarasamy writes with heart, wit, and an unflinching eye about the complexities of family, war, and finding one's home. Woven together by sentences that are at once surprising and satisfying, <i>Half Gods </i>spans the miles and decades that separate its characters with ease, the emotional resonance of the brothers at its core as indelible as the demigods for which they're named. --Sara Novic, author of <i>Girl at War</i> <p/>These are wonderful stories, finely poised, beautifully written, and brimming with a rare wisdom. It's a pleasure to dwell in Kumarasamy's voice. In its shallows and swells, you'll find the most delicate visions of the everyday as well as the sweeping tug of history. --Kanishk Tharoor, author of <i>Swimmer Among the Stars</i> <p/><i>Half Gods </i>distills the mysteries of the human soul. In this age of displacement and sorrow, these stunning stories are reminders that even in the darkest times it is possible to write--to live--with clear-eyed compassion for others. --Ceridwen Dovey, author of <i>Only the Animals</i></p><br><p/><br></br><p><b> About the Author </b></p></br></br><b>Akil Kumarasamy</b> is a writer from New Jersey. Her fiction has appeared in <i>Harper's Magazine</i>, <i>American Short Fiction</i>, <i>Boston Review</i>, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan, and has been a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the University of East Anglia. <i>Half Gods</i> is her first book.
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