Join us on Tuesday, September 7th at 6pm PT when Shruti Swamy joins us to discuss her debut novel, The Archer, with Meng Jin at 9th Ave!
Masks Required for In-Person Attendance
Register at the link below to join us online
Zoom Registration
Can’t join us in person but want a personalized copy?
Order your copy of The Archer here by September 7, write who you would like the book made out to in your order comment, and we will handle the rest!
Your order will ship after the event date.
Praise for The Archer
“This novel swallowed me whole. The Archer is the kind of book you always hope for: lush and sensual, tasted and felt, with striking images that play out like film behind the eyes. Swamy evokes an India that resists flat stereotype and teems with exuberance, beauty, and life. The Archer is timeless yet utterly modern as it asks what it means for a woman to make a life of art.”
—C Pam Zhang, author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold
“Shruti Swamy is a writer to celebrate. Her fiction is provocative, precise, and gorgeously inventive.”
—Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning
“This is a singular work, a story of a dancer, and of a hungry self seated at the table of womanness and desire and art, told with unparalleled originality and elegance. Swamy writes with a thrilling clarity of vision that wakes the sleepwalker right into joyful consciousness. Every word is intimate, honest, ecstatic—utterly alive.”
—Meng Jin, author of Little Gods
About The Archer
Kiese Laymon called Shruti Swamy’s debut book of stories, A House Is a Body, “one of the greatest short story collections of the 2020s.” Now, Swamy brings us an accomplished and immersive coming-of-age novel set in the Bombay of the 1960s and 1970s.
As a child, Vidya exists to serve her family, watch over her younger brother, and make sense of a motherless world. One day she catches sight of a class where the students are learning Kathak, a precise, dazzling form of dance that requires the utmost discipline and focus. Kathak quickly becomes the organizing principle of Vidya’s life, even as she leaves home for college, falls in love with her best friend, and battles demands on her time, her future, and her body. Can Vidya give herself over to her art and also be a wife in Bombay’s carefully delineated society? Can she shed the legacy of her own imperfect, unknowable mother? Must she, herself, also become a mother?
Intensely lyrical and deeply sensual, with writing as rhythmically mesmerizing as Kathak itself, The Archer is about the transformative power of art and the possibilities that love can open when we’re ready.
About Shruti Swamy
Shruti Swamy is the author of the story collection, A House Is a Body, which was a finalist for the Pen/Robert Bingham Prize, the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction, and longlisted for the Story Prize. Her work has been published by the Paris Review, McSweeney’s, and anthologized in the O. Henry Prize Stories. Her debut novel, The Archer, will be published by Algonquin Books in September 2021. She lives in San Francisco.
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