Swimmer Among the Stars: Stories
(Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read)
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian and NPR
"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.
If you are having problem transferring a title to your device, please fill out this support form or visit the library so we can help you to use our eBooks and eAudio Books.
Kanishk Tharoor. (2017). Swimmer Among the Stars: Stories. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Kanishk Tharoor. 2017. Swimmer Among the Stars: Stories. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Kanishk Tharoor, Swimmer Among the Stars: Stories. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.
MLA Citation (style guide)Kanishk Tharoor. Swimmer Among the Stars: Stories. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.
| Library | Owned | Available |
|---|---|---|
| Shared Digital Collection | 0 | 0 |
OverDrive Product Record
- images
- cover:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/2390-1/{7B585EF9-15CF-465D-9DF2-E23A735BF982}Img100.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- thumbnail:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/2390-1/{7B585EF9-15CF-465D-9DF2-E23A735BF982}Img200.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- cover150Wide:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/2390-1/7B5/85E/F9/{7B585EF9-15CF-465D-9DF2-E23A735BF982}Img150.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- cover300Wide:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/2390-1/7B5/85E/F9/{7B585EF9-15CF-465D-9DF2-E23A735BF982}Img400.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- cover:
- formats
- identifiers:
- type: ISBN
- value: 9780374715397
- name: Adobe EPUB eBook
- id: ebook-epub-adobe
- identifiers:
- identifiers:
- type: ASIN
- value: B01KTJZ3XU
- name: Kindle Book
- id: ebook-kindle
- identifiers:
- identifiers:
- type: ISBN
- value: 9780374715397
- name: OverDrive Read
- id: ebook-overdrive
- identifiers:
- otherFormatIdentifiers
- type: ISBN
- value: 9780374272180
- mediaType
- eBook
- primaryCreator
- role: Author
- name: Kanishk Tharoor
- isOwnedByCollections
- False
- title
- Swimmer Among the Stars
- dateAdded
- 2017-10-14T00:05:41.54Z
- contentDetails
- href: https://link.overdrive.com?websiteID=141&titleID=2930900
- type: text/html
- account:
- name: Sacramento Public Library (CA)
- id: 1151
- sortTitle
- Swimmer Among the Stars Stories
- crossRefId
- 2930900
- subtitle
- Stories
- id
- 7B585EF9-15CF-465D-9DF2-E23A735BF982
- starRating
- 4.4
OverDrive MetaData
- isPublicDomain
- False
- formats
- fileName: SwimmerAmongtheStars_9780374715397_2930900
- partCount: 0
- fileSize: 3521194
- identifiers:
- type: ISBN
- value: 9780374715397
- rights:
- type: Copying
- value: 0
- type: Printing
- value: 0
- type: Lending
- value: 0
- type: ReadAloud
- value: 0
- type: ExpirationRights
- value: 0
- name: Adobe EPUB eBook
- id: ebook-epub-adobe
- onSaleDate: 03/14/2017
- samples:
- source: From the book
- formatType: ebook-overdrive
- url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=7b585ef9-15cf-465d-9df2-e23a735bf982&.epub-sample.overdrive.com
- fileName: SwimmerAmongtheStars_2930900
- partCount: 0
- fileSize: 0
- identifiers:
- type: ASIN
- value: B01KTJZ3XU
- name: Kindle Book
- id: ebook-kindle
- onSaleDate: 03/14/2017
- samples:
- source: From the book
- formatType: ebook-overdrive
- url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=7b585ef9-15cf-465d-9df2-e23a735bf982&.epub-sample.overdrive.com
- fileName: SwimmerAmongtheStars_9780374715397_2930900
- partCount: 0
- fileSize: 523069
- identifiers:
- type: ISBN
- value: 9780374715397
- name: OverDrive Read
- id: ebook-overdrive
- onSaleDate: 03/14/2017
- samples:
- source: From the book
- formatType: ebook-overdrive
- url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=7b585ef9-15cf-465d-9df2-e23a735bf982&.epub-sample.overdrive.com
- keywords
- value: Literary
- creators
- role: Author
- fileAs: Tharoor, Kanishk
- bioText:
Kanishk Tharoor is a writer based in New York City. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Guardian, the VQR, and elsewhere. His short story "Tale of the Teahouse" was nominated for a National Magazine Award. He presented "Museum of Lost Objects," a ten-part BBC radio series on cultural destruction in the Middle East. He studied at Yale, Columbia, and New York University, where he was a "Writer in Public Schools" fellow.
Kanishk is the author of Swimmer Among the Stars: Stories. - name: Kanishk Tharoor
- publishDate
- 2017-03-14T00:00:00-04:00
- isOwnedByCollections
- True
- title
- Swimmer Among the Stars
- fullDescription
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian and NPR
"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.- reviews
- premium: False
- source: Meron Hadero, The New York Times Book Review
- content:
"[A] remarkably crafted and imaginative debut . . . if it's true, as is said in "The Loss of Muzaffar," that "humanity, after all, was nothing but a library," then the experience of reading this collection is like watching a contemplative, concerned--yet playful--observer leafing through its volumes."
- premium: False
- source: Jason Heller, NPR
- content: "Sparkling, magical, heartbreaking . . . whimsical and wise . . . graceful, haunting. . . It's a testament to the author's empathy, rich voice, and immaculate craftsmanship that [Swimmer Among the Stars] succeeds in being all these things -- even as it comforts, illuminates, and unnerves."
- premium: False
- source: David Busis, Electric Literature
- content: "You can open Swimmer Among the Stars to any page and find a sentence worth quoting, a scenario worth remembering. Though the stories span the Battle of Magnesia, in which Rome defeated the Seleucid Empire, to a dystopian future in which the United Nations has been chased to a near-Earth orbit, Tharoor wears his erudition lightly, privileging poetry over political messaging. Lush, playful, and intoxicated by history, the book stuck with me long after I closed it."
- premium: True
- source:
- content:
January 9, 2017
In “Cultural Property,” one of the most intriguing and salient stories in Tharoor’s debut collection, a young Indian archeologist is waiting on a cold beach on the North Sea, having secretly uncovered a centuries-old sword of Anglo-Saxon iron. Having just called smugglers to bring the sword to a museum in Patna, India, he imagines the sword labeled there as an artifact of “Primitive Britain,” a thought that confirms for him that this act is far more than “revenge.” It’s these big themes—of history, war, invasion, and exploration—that Tharoor seeks to humanize. In the title story, an old, unnamed woman in an old, unnamed country is the “last speaker” of an old, unnamed language, and young academic ethnographers have arrived to record her, unintentionally raising all kinds of questions about the quest to capture what’s already been lost. In “Elephant at Sea,” a princess in Morocco requests an Indian elephant. But by the time one arrives, years later, the princess is studying abroad and everyone, including the elephant, is vexed by how one powerful person’s whim can create a mess no one knows how to fix. In “A United Nations of Space,” a future delegation of international ambassadors convenes in the cosmos to “rally the world around the memory of order.” Though the tendency to keep characters unnamed and their lives painted in broad strokes blends the stories together, Tharoor’s collection is imaginative and relevant.
- premium: True
- source:
- content:
Starred review from January 1, 2017
Tharoor's debut story collection ranges widely across geography, between centuries, among circumstances.In the first story, a woman, the last speaker of an unnamed language, is interviewed by a handful of anthropologists. "Please speak as it comes naturally to you," they tell her, so they can record the language before it dies out completely. She finds herself making up a story for them: a bride takes off on a rocket after realizing she'd always wanted to be an astronaut and never a bride. But because there is no word for "astronaut" in the woman's language, she constructs one herself, from suffixes that literally mean "swimmer among the stars." So language becomes both the setting and the means for exploration, for wonder. The idea echoes through the collection's other stories. In "Tale of the Teahouse," a small city prepares to be overtaken by Genghis Khan's army: men and women sip tea and munch pastries as they speculate on the habits and customs of the marauders. In "Elephant at Sea," an Indian diplomat assists in the laborious transportation of an elephant to Morocco, a gift for the Moroccan princess. Tharoor, who presented the popular BBC program Museum of Lost Objects, seems equally at home in the present and in the distant past. His debut work of fiction is a truly global collection: he skips as easily between continents as if he were jumping rope. Sometimes he specifies the time period and setting of a story; other times, you're left to wonder. Either way, he takes obvious delight in the playful, the gently absurd. His prose can be elegant, ironic, deadpan. Just as often, it is sweetly melancholic. Tharoor is clearly a monumental talent, and his debut is a pleasure, from the first page to the last.COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
- popularity
- 81
- links
- self:
- href: https://api.overdrive.com/v1/collections/v1L1BWwAAAA2I/products/7b585ef9-15cf-465d-9df2-e23a735bf982/metadata
- type: application/vnd.overdrive.api+json
- self:
- id
- 7b585ef9-15cf-465d-9df2-e23a735bf982
- starRating
- 4
- images
- cover:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/2390-1/{7B585EF9-15CF-465D-9DF2-E23A735BF982}Img100.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- thumbnail:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/2390-1/{7B585EF9-15CF-465D-9DF2-E23A735BF982}Img200.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- cover150Wide:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/2390-1/7B5/85E/F9/{7B585EF9-15CF-465D-9DF2-E23A735BF982}Img150.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- cover300Wide:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/2390-1/7B5/85E/F9/{7B585EF9-15CF-465D-9DF2-E23A735BF982}Img400.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- cover:
- isPublicPerformanceAllowed
- False
- languages
- code: en
- name: English
- subjects
- value: Fiction
- value: Literature
- value: Short Stories
- publishDateText
- 03/14/2017
- otherFormatIdentifiers
- type: ISBN
- value: 9780374272180
- mediaType
- eBook
- shortDescription
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian and NPR
"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...- sortTitle
- Swimmer Among the Stars Stories
- crossRefId
- 2930900
- subtitle
- Stories
- publisher
- Farrar, Straus and Giroux
