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The Way You Want to Be Loved

The Way You Want to Be Loved

S$23.00Price

“A collection of poignant, finely crafted stories set against the backdrop of violence that has long racked north-eastern India.”

–Amitav Ghosh

 

“A new voice in the burgeoning oeuvre of anglophone fiction from northeast India.”

—World Literature Today

 

At a New Delhi conference, an Assamese writer is interrogated on why he writes about magical folktales instead of the insurgencies. A mother splashes around in the village lake to mask the lovemaking sounds of her son with another man. A newly-arrived graduate student in Minnesota navigates living arrangements with his white roommate, Mike, and Mike’s Indian girlfriend.

 

In agile and frank prose, The Way You Want to Be Loved tells the stories of queer, displaced lives from India’s Northeast, an underrepresented region in English fiction. A hybrid cast of characters represents the common people in these thirteen stories, whether western-trained academic or village sorcerer, army soldier or local politician, homeward-bound son or dutiful daughter-in-law. They wrestle with diasporic melancholia, the social pressures of familial duty, and the search for their own personhood, even as they live in a world where personhood is continually compromised and reshaped under oppressive forces larger than themselves. Aruni Kashyap offers up a powerful critique of the malfunctioning democracies of India and the US, deftly balancing devastation and tragedy with a darkly humorous tone that has readers questioning their laughter.

 

At its core, The Way You Want to Be Loved explores what it means to love, desire, and long for life under the duress of everyday and state-sanctioned violence and discrimination.

Quantity
SKU: 978-1-958652-08-4
  • Tech Specs

    ISBN: 978-1-958652-08-4

    Format: Paperback

    Trim size: 140 mmW x 216 mmH

    Page count: 256

    Price: 23 SGD before GST

    Pub month: July 2025

  • About the Author

    Aruni Kashyap is the author of His Father’s Disease: Stories and the novel The House With a Thousand Stories. Along with editing a collection of stories called How to Tell the Story of an Insurgency, he has also translated two novels from Assamese to English, published by Zubaan Books and Penguin Random House. Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Faculty Research Grants in the Humanities and Arts Program, Arts Lab Faculty Fellowship, and the Charles Wallace India Trust Scholarship for Creative Writing to the University of Edinburgh, his poetry collection, There is No Good Time for Bad News was nominated for the 58th Georgia Author of the Year Awards 2022, a finalist for the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize and Four Way Books Levis Award in Poetry. His short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Catapult, Bitch Media, The Boston Review, Electric Literature, The Oxford Anthology of Writings from Northeast, The Kenyon Review, The New York Times, The Guardian UK, and others. He also writes in Assamese and is the author of a novel called Noikhon Etia Duroit, and three novellas. He is an Associate Professor of English & Creative Writing and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Georgia, Athens.

  • What Others Say

    ‘These powerful stories shorten the distance between South Asia and America, which are, refreshingly, not positioned as opposite pulls but as companion landscapes where dream, desire, and defiance thrive. With a cast of characters who are emotionally intelligent yet still flawed, imperfect, yet still endearing, Aruni Kashyap eschews the predictable narratives and brings us unique takes on leaving home, loving family, and longing for passion. Daring and surprising, The Way You Want to Be Loved is the must-read of our times.’

    —Rigoberto González, author of To the Boy Who Was Night

     

    Indian literature is extremely diverse, spreading over multiple vernaculars and dialects, each with vibrant histories. Indian writing in English also represents an old body of work that long precedes the country’s independence from British colonial rule in 1947. Despite this dynamic literary landscape, literature from India’s Northeast—a self-sufficient region with a mélange of languages, cultures, and peoples—has remained relatively obscure to the wider world until recently. In the last two or so decades, a number of outstanding writers and translators of fiction in English have emerged from this region, dispelling its obscure position and challenging the way Indian literature is read globally. One prominent name associated with this dynamic wave of storytelling is Aruni Kashyap.

    —Split Lip Magazine

     

    ‘This masterful collection mixes Chekovian realism with Borgesian magic to create a new and vital literary voice for our times. With wit, intelligence, and humor, Kashyap’s stories grapple with the tangled predicament of anyone who has ever felt themselves an outsider: in a new country, in the labyrinth of academia, or within one’s own family. These stories range the world from the mountains of the Himalayas to the cold plains of the American Midwest, and I would happily follow Kashyap’s writing anywhere.’

    —Nathan Oates, author of A Flaw in the Design

     

    ‘A new voice in the burgeoning oeuvre of anglophone fiction from northeast India. Kashyap’s collection of short stories continues the exploration of the impact of political violence on everyday life in the northeast Indian state of Assam that characterized The House, while simultaneously charting new territory.’

    —World Literature Today

     

    In The Way You Want to Be Loved, Kashyap precisely embarks on a journey to undo the single-story surrounding his homeland. He makes no effort to play safe by catering to the mainland’s expectations from a writer coming from India’s Northeast. With the first story itself Kashyap plunges headlong into murky waters without losing sight of his goal—to narrate the tales of displaced individuals desperately negotiating home.’

    —HuffPost

     

    ‘The stories in Aruni Kashyap’s The Way You Want to Be Loved share a discussion about the struggles of finding community and acceptance, whether as a result of sexuality, relocation, or misunderstandings based on perceived cultural awareness. . . . Despite the dark themes, most of Kashyap’s stories have a dry sense of humor and occasionally make the reader laugh out loud.’

    —Rain Taxi Review (Minneapolis)

     

    ‘One marvels at Kashyap’s technical prowess, the deft chess moves on the storyboard—the flow of the story intact at all times. . . . The Way You Want to Be Loved is an acerbic, unusual, transgressive and frequently funny collection that I’m sure will be talked about for years to come. It’s also dark as f***, so carry a flashlight.’

    —Open

     

    ‘And every once in a while, Kashyap’s conversational, no-frills prose yields startling imagery: a woman seeing a bloodied face printed in a newspaper and imagining that the blood has seeped into the red lentils that were wrapped in the paper; another woman swimming compulsively and noisily across a pond because she doesn’t want to hear the sounds of her son making love with another man in his hut. At such moments, these stories strike a fine balance between being stark depictions of real lives and being as fable-like as the tale of the oppressed leaf-girl Tejimola.’

    —Scroll.in

     

    ‘In their very existence, Kashyap’s stories are defiant, challenging the mainstream intelligentsia’s authority: Why must the voice of the subaltern fit the narratives constructed by those that are not? The Way You Want to Be Loved is a book we did not know we needed, and for precisely that reason, a book that must be read.’

    —The Hindu Business Line

     

    ‘To open author Aruni Kashyap’s book The Way You Want to Be Loved is to find your way into a wonderland of long short stories. . . . Watch out for this voice from a lesser-known corner of our country.

    —The New Indian Express

     

    ‘When an author writes from a restive part of India—say, Kashmir or, in the present case, Assam—readers often expect him to focus on questions of violence or identity. This can unwittingly infringe on the author’s right to express himself freely, and relegate his own experiences to a secondary position. In The Way You Want to Be Loved, Aruni Kashyap not only addresses this issue but also challenges it through remarkable short stories, while exploring the ideas of linguistic and ethnic stereotypes and sexuality.’

    —The Telegraph

     

    ‘In a cool, dispassionate tone that mines intimate, sometimes incidental situations, Kashyap’s stories are quietly affecting, often sparkling with valuable insight. . . . Kashyap explores love and sex, desire and myth, violence and conflict, at an easy, page-turning pace. It reminded me very much of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s unforgettable collection of stories, The Thing Around Your Neck, which drew out quietly devastating moments in the lives of Nigerian men and women, many of them living away from their homeland in America, caught in an unending abyss between two disparate worlds.’

    —The Asian Age

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