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“One of the best collections I’ve ever read. Every single story is a standout.”—Roxane Gay WINNER OF THE CHAUTAUQUA PRIZE • LONGLISTED FOR THE STORY PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • Refinery29 • BookRiot “Fuses science, myth, and imagination into a dark and gorgeous series of questions about our current predicaments.”—Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See A dystopian tale about genetically modified septuplets who are struck by a mysterious illness; a love story about a man bewitched by a mermaid; a stirring imagining of the lives of Nigerian schoolgirls in the aftermath of a Boko Haram kidnapping. The stories in All the Names They Used for God break down genre barriers—from science fiction to American Gothic to magical realism to horror—and are united by each character’s brutal struggle with fate. Like many of us, the characters in this collection are in pursuit of the sublime. Along the way, they must navigate the borderland between salvation and destruction. NAMED A MUST-READ BOOK BY Harper’s Bazaar • Entertainment Weekly • AM New York • Reading Women AND A TOP READ BY Elle • Fast Company • The Christian Science Monitor • Bustle • Shondaland • Popsugar •Refinery29 • Bookish • Newsday • The Millions • Asian American Writers’ Workshop • HelloGiggles “Strange and wonderful . . . delightfully unexpected.”—The New York Times Book Review “Completing one [story] is like having lived an entire life, and then being born, breathless, into another.”—Carmen Maria Machado “Captivating.”—NPR “Gripping.”—Los Angeles Review of Books “[A] remarkable debut . . . Sachdeva is seemingly fearless and her talent limitless.”—AM New York “This phenomenal debut short-story collection is filled with stories that bring the otherworldly to life and examine the strangeness of humanity.”—Bustle “So rich they read like dreams . . . They are enormous stories, not in length but in ambition, each an entirely new, unsparing world. Beautiful, draining—and entirely unforgettable.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“One of the best collections I’ve ever read. Every single story is a standout.”—Roxane Gay WINNER OF THE CHAUTAUQUA PRIZE • LONGLISTED FOR THE STORY PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • Refinery29 • BookRiot “Fuses science, myth, and imagination into a dark and gorgeous series of questions about our current predicaments.”—Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See A dystopian tale about genetically modified septuplets who are struck by a mysterious illness; a love story about a man bewitched by a mermaid; a stirring imagining of the lives of Nigerian schoolgirls in the aftermath of a Boko Haram kidnapping. The stories in All the Names They Used for God break down genre barriers—from science fiction to American Gothic to magical realism to horror—and are united by each character’s brutal struggle with fate. Like many of us, the characters in this collection are in pursuit of the sublime. Along the way, they must navigate the borderland between salvation and destruction. NAMED A MUST-READ BOOK BY Harper’s Bazaar • Entertainment Weekly • AM New York • Reading Women AND A TOP READ BY Elle • Fast Company • The Christian Science Monitor • Bustle • Shondaland • Popsugar •Refinery29 • Bookish • Newsday • The Millions • Asian American Writers’ Workshop • HelloGiggles “Strange and wonderful . . . delightfully unexpected.”—The New York Times Book Review “Completing one [story] is like having lived an entire life, and then being born, breathless, into another.”—Carmen Maria Machado “Captivating.”—NPR “Gripping.”—Los Angeles Review of Books “[A] remarkable debut . . . Sachdeva is seemingly fearless and her talent limitless.”—AM New York “This phenomenal debut short-story collection is filled with stories that bring the otherworldly to life and examine the strangeness of humanity.”—Bustle “So rich they read like dreams . . . They are enormous stories, not in length but in ambition, each an entirely new, unsparing world. Beautiful, draining—and entirely unforgettable.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Excerpts-
From the book
THE WORLD BY NIGHT
Sadie was sixteen when her parents died, and the gravedigger told her he would charge her less if she’d help him. Typhoid had killed so many people in town that he was tired of digging.
“Can we do it at night?” she asked. Her skin could not weather the long hours in the sun, and in the glare of day she would be nearly blind.
He agreed, and so there they were, twilight ’til dawn, shaving slivers of hard-packed earth from the walls of the graves. They had the coffins lowered by morning and the gravedigger looked at Sadie’s flushed face and said, “Go on and get inside now. I’ll finish this. I’ll do it proper. You can have your own service tonight.”
“Aren’t you afraid of me?” she asked. She’d been wanting to ask all night. When she was tired or nervous her irises often jumped back and forth uncontrollably, as though she were being shaken, and she knew they were doing so now. It unsettled people, and more than one preacher had tried to cast spirits out of her, to no effect.
The gravedigger looked at the earth for a long time, the pits with the bodies resting at the bottoms. “I saw another girl like you once, at a freak show in Abilene,” he said. “White skin and hair like yours, eyes like I never saw, almost violet. They called her the Devil’s Bride, but I think she would’ve liked to’ve been married to a good man, tending chickens and baking biscuits just like anyone else. Anyhow, you’re a fine digger.”
Now Sadie is twenty and it is June and her husband Zachary has been gone for two months, moving southeast across the Ozarks and maybe farther, to look for work. She is not afraid of being alone. She was alone for two years before she met Zachary and she had thought she would spend the rest of her life that way. Just knowing he will come back sooner or later is enough.
She sleeps in the sod house through the bright hours of the day when most women do their chores, saves her work for early morning and dusk. When the dark has settled she walks across the prairie, making her way by scent and feel. She finds some clumps of grass that smell like onion, others like sweet basil, others still covered in silvery down that tickles her fingertips.
As the days pass, she saves up things to tell Zachary about when he comes home: A patch of sweet blackberries by the side of the pond where she draws the wash water. A hollow where a covey of grouse nest. Most important and mysterious of all, a hole in the ground with nothing but darkness inside, about the size of a barrel top. The grasses there move even when there is no breeze, and the hole breathes cool air. Once, she lowered a lantern into it at the end of her clothesline and saw a slope of jagged stone leading down. She stuck her head into the opening and breathed, and the air smelled just like the walls of her parents’ graves.
When Sadie first met Zachary it was dusk and he was drunk. She was sweeping the front steps of the house she had lived in with her parents, and had a pot of elderberry jam boiling on the stove inside. A man stopped at the gate and said, “Appaloosa.” Sadie kept sweeping, but the word brought to mind the horses, stark white with a dappling of dark spots, that the Indians rode across the plains. “Appaloosa,” the man said again. “Appaloosa, I’m talking to you.” He sauntered up to her and took her face in his hand, fumes of whiskey and turpentine exuding from his clothes. He had straight black hair to his shoulders and fingers that were strong and calloused. Sadie stood...
About the Author-
Anjali Sachdeva’s fiction has appeared in The Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, The Yale Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Literary Review, and TheBest American Nonrequired Reading. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has taught writing at the University of Iowa, Augustana College, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Pittsburgh. She also worked for six years at the Creative Nonfiction Foundation, where she was director of educational programs. She has hiked through the backcountry of Canada, Iceland, Kenya, Mexico, and the United States, and spent much of her childhood reading fantasy novels and waiting to be whisked away to an alternate universe. Instead, she lives in Pittsburgh, which is pretty wonderful as far as places in this universe go. This is her first book.
Reviews-
December 4, 2017 The nine stories in Sachdeva’s intriguing debut collection raise challenging questions about human responses to short-circuited desires. Equally at home in realistic and speculative plots, Sachdeva crafts precise character studies with minimal flourishes. “Anything You Might Want” follows the quick crumbling of the relationship between the daughter of a rich, controlling Montana magnate and an indebted miner, and her tantalizing opportunity for revenge. “Robert Greenman and the Mermaid” also focuses on an unwise emotional attachment, bringing together a laconic fisherman and an actual mermaid who nets his ship the largest catches in years. Some stories are creative riffs on historic events, including the title story, in which two kidnapping victims of Boko Haram discover a quasimagical form of hypnosis that can control men. Others, such as “Manus,” point to alarming futures, in which aliens have conquered earth without upsetting life too much—other than requiring all humans replace their hands with metal prosthetics. The most affecting story, “Pleiades,” updates the hubris of Greek tragedy: the inexplicable illnesses of genetically modified septuplets undercut their parents’ faith in science. Throughout, characters face a perpetual constraint against full expression of their emotions. These inventive stories will challenge readers to rethink how people cope with thwarted hopes.
Starred review from December 15, 2017 So rich they read like dreams--or, more often, nightmares--the nine stories in Sachdeva's otherworldly debut center upon the unforgiving forces that determine the shape of our lives, as glorious as they are brutal."Wonder and terror meet at the horizon, and we walk the knife-edge between them," Sachdeva writes in her brief introduction; this is the world of her stories. There are no merciless gods here, not like in the olden days; instead, there is "science, nature, psychology, industry." But these modern forces are as vast and incomprehensible as any gods were. The stories that follow span time, space, and logic: Nigeria and New Hampshire, the past and the future, realism and science fiction. And yet, for all its scope, it is a strikingly unified collection, with each story reading like a poem, or a fable, staring into the unknowable. In "The World by Night," a lonely young woman in the Ozarks is abandoned--temporarily, and then forever--by her husband and finds dangerous refuge in a secret cave. "Logging Lake" follows a man in the midst of a post-breakup reinvention on the haunting date that will change the course of his life (whatever you're thinking, that's not it). "All the Names for God" follows two Nigerian women now forging "normal" adult lives after having been kidnapped as teens by extremists, their unimaginable history intertwined with the struggles of acclimating to the world they used to know. Equal parts cinematic and nauseating, the dystopian "Manus" is set in a world invaded by alien "Masters," who demand, as part of their dominion, that human citizens undergo "re-handing"--a painless procedure that replaces hands with metal forks, required for everyone, sooner or later. They are enormous stories, not in length but in ambition, each an entirely new, unsparing world.Beautiful, draining--and entirely unforgettable.
COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
March 1, 2018
In the best stories in this smooth collection, individuals longing for something better face adversity and keep moving. An albino girl in the American West loses her parents, marries a charming drifter who loves her but decides to continue his travels, then teeters at the edge of a chasm, with people below calling, and falls "into their waiting arms." An ambitious young man leaves Denmark to "find a place where he could live with abandon," is horribly injured in a factory blast and sullenly accepts dependence on his young daughter, yet travels with her and her mentor to excavate ruins in Egypt. Two young African women kidnapped as teenagers by Muslim extremists return home, having learned to get what they want. Indeed, adversity can teach you things; a man determined to be new at the dating game has a disastrous camping experience (the nutty woman whose invitation he accepted has disappeared) and decides he was happier with his old self. VERDICT Not all these stories startle, but Sachdeva is a writer to watch.
Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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