Swimmer among the stars
Subtitle: stories
By: Kanishk Tharoor
Edition: First American edition.
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 239
ISBN-13: 9780374272180
Copyright date: 2017
Work titles: Short stories
Description: "[A] writer who is gifted not just with extraordinary talent but also with a subtle, original, and probing mind."--Amitav Ghosh In one of the singularly imaginative stories from Kanishk Tharoor's Swimmer Among the Stars, despondent diplomats entertain themselves by playing table tennis in zero gravity--for after rising seas destroy Manhattan, the United Nations moves to an orbiting space hotel. In other tales, a team of anthropologists treks to a remote village to record a language's last surviving speaker intoning her native tongue; an elephant and his driver cross the ocean to meet the whims of a Moroccan princess; and Genghis Khan's marauding army steadily approaches an unnamed city's walls. With exuberant originality and startling vision, Tharoor cuts against the grain of literary convention, drawing equally from ancient history and current events. His world-spanning stories speak to contemporary challenges of environmental collapse and cultural appropriation, but also to the workings of legend and their timeless human truths. Whether refashioning the romances of Alexander the Great or confronting the plight of today's refugees, Tharoor writes with distinctive insight and remarkable assurance. Swimmer Among the Stars announces the arrival of a vital, enchanting talent."--

"A debut collection of wildly original and intensely imagined stories"--
Table of contents: title: Swimmer among the stars --; title: Tale of the teahouse --; title: Elephant at sea --; title: A United Nations in space --; title: Portrait with coal fire --; title: The mirrors of Iskandar --; title: The fall of an eyelash --; title: Letters home --; title: Cultural property --; title: the phalanx --; title: The loss of Muzaffar --; title: The astrolabe --; title: Icebreakers.