Every now and then, a story both vibrant and haunting comes along and completely captures your attention. These stories are not light and breezy. They describe the beautiful and dark truths of life with equal reverence and attention to detail. They are painfully honest about the realities we would rather not face, but still take great care in plucking moments of joy and peace from the everyday. The Kite Runner, A Burning, and Shuggie Bain come to mind when I think of such stories, and now, The Sea Elephants joins their ranks.
In The Sea Elephants, Shastri Akella combines elements both ancient and modern to tell a deep, powerful, and poignant story of a young, queer boy coming of age in India. Art and found family are the heroes of this story, along with our protagonist, Shagun. There is a significant gap in the Western literary canon when it comes to South Asian myth, tradition, and queerness, which makes this book even more vital. It is a stunning, mesmerizing debut novel. I hope you’ll enjoy getting to learn more about Shastri. I have a feeling this won’t be the last time you’ll see his name.
— Sarah Arnold, Marketing Director at Parnassus Books
I’ve been listening to: The Schitt’s Creek cover of “Simply the Best” because my heart melts every time I remember Patrick singing it or David dancing to the Tina Turner original.
I love to watch: The horror genre that’s produced some thought-provoking work recently. His House, about two refugees who relocate from South Sudan to London, depicts survivor guilt through the lens of dreamlike, uncanny sequences drawn from African folklore.
Something I saw online that made me laugh, cry, or think: Kunkush the cat made me laugh, cry, and think, all in 2 minutes. The video traces an Iraqi family’s separation from and reunion with their beloved pet.
A creator who’s doing something I admire: Saim Sadiq. His film Joyland, set in Pakistan, has a trans character playing one of two leads. It also shows, with restraint and a tragic tenderness, South Asian middle class dynamics and how it effects women.
A book I recently recommended to someone else: Sarah Matthew’s All This Could Be Different for how seamlessly it blends empathy with intelligence and wit with poignance, all with a queer South Asian lead.
If I could teleport anywhere in the world right now, I’d go to: Ireland, specifically County Derry where a vampire, Abhartach (which, interestingly, translates to ‘dwarf’) is supposedly buried upside down. One of the two heroes of my next novel is an Irish vampire.
I wish I knew more about: How to paint; visual art, particularly the canvases of Salman Toor, connects to something larger than myself, so I wish I could practice this powerful, sublime medium.
My favorite thing about bookstores: They build communities: through books, readings, and warm passionate booksellers. When I came out and was isolated for a time from my biological family, Center for Fiction in Brooklyn gave me a sense of community with their shelf full of books by queer writers, curated by bookseller Alana and the conversation they hosted between Garth Greenwell Andrea Lawlor fort the launch of his collection, Cleanness.
The Sea Elephants is on shelves now!
Musing 