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Half Gods
(Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read)

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Published:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2018
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Checked Out
Description

A startlingly beautiful debut, Half Gods brings together the exiled, the disappeared, the seekers. Following the fractured origins and destines of two brothers named after demigods from the ancient epic the Mahabharata, we meet a family struggling with the reverberations of the past in their lives. These ten interlinked stories redraw the map of our world in surprising ways: following an act of violence, a baby girl is renamed after a Hindu goddess but raised as a Muslim; a lonely butcher from Angola finds solace in a family of refugees in New Jersey; a gentle entomologist, in Sri Lanka, discovers unexpected reserves of courage while searching for his missing son.
By turns heartbreaking and fiercely inventive, Half Gods reveals with sharp clarity the ways that parents, children, and friends act as unknowing mirrors to each other, revealing in their all-too human weaknesses, hopes, and sorrows a connection to the divine.

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Format:
Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read
Street Date:
06/05/2018
Language:
English
ISBN:
9780374717223
ASIN:
B077FL2DSC
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Citations
APA Citation (style guide)

Akil Kumarasamy. (2018). Half Gods. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Akil Kumarasamy. 2018. Half Gods. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Akil Kumarasamy, Half Gods. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Akil Kumarasamy. Half Gods. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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Grouped Work ID:
9f2a262a-1ec3-97c0-2c74-7a235a0d4e42
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Needs Update?:
No
Date Added:
Jun 12, 2018 18:52:19
Date Updated:
Jun 12, 2018 18:52:19
Last Metadata Check:
Feb 05, 2023 11:06:56
Last Metadata Change:
Jan 29, 2023 10:42:45
Last Availability Check:
Mar 24, 2024 10:24:52
Last Availability Change:
Feb 07, 2023 00:41:07
Last Grouped Work Modification Time:
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OverDrive Product Record

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      • bioText: Akil Kumarasamy is the author of the linked story collection Half Gods, which was named a New York Times Editors' Choice, was awarded the Bard Fiction Prize and the Story Prize Spotlight Award, and was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. Her work has appeared in Harper's Magazine, American Short Fiction, BOMB, and other publications. She has received fellowships from the University of East Anglia, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Yaddo, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She is an assistant professor in the Rutgers University-Newark MFA program.
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shortDescription

A startlingly beautiful debut, Half Gods brings together the exiled, the disappeared, the seekers. Following the fractured origins and destines of two brothers named after demigods from the ancient epic the Mahabharata, we meet a family struggling with the reverberations of the past in their lives. These ten interlinked stories redraw the map of our world in surprising ways: following an act of violence, a baby girl is renamed after a Hindu goddess but raised as a Muslim; a lonely butcher from Angola finds solace in a family of refugees in New Jersey; a gentle entomologist, in Sri Lanka, discovers unexpected reserves of courage while searching for his missing son.
By turns heartbreaking and fiercely inventive, Half Gods reveals with sharp clarity the ways that parents, children, and friends act as unknowing mirrors to each other, revealing in their all-too human weaknesses, hopes, and sorrows a connection to the divine.

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title
Half Gods
fullDescription

A startlingly beautiful debut, Half Gods brings together the exiled, the disappeared, the seekers. Following the fractured origins and destines of two brothers named after demigods from the ancient epic the Mahabharata, we meet a family struggling with the reverberations of the past in their lives. These ten interlinked stories redraw the map of our world in surprising ways: following an act of violence, a baby girl is renamed after a Hindu goddess but raised as a Muslim; a lonely butcher from Angola finds solace in a family of refugees in New Jersey; a gentle entomologist, in Sri Lanka, discovers unexpected reserves of courage while searching for his missing son.
By turns heartbreaking and fiercely inventive, Half Gods reveals with sharp clarity the ways that parents, children, and friends act as unknowing mirrors to each other, revealing in their all-too human weaknesses, hopes, and sorrows a connection to the divine.

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reviews
      • premium: False
      • source: Tania James, The New York Times Book Review
      • content: "The prose itself is a marvel . . . Intimate gestures arrive like shafts of light throughout this lyrical and affecting collection, sparing us briefly from the dark."
      • premium: False
      • source: Katy Waldman, The New Yorker
      • content: "Like family members around a dinner table, the tales in [Half Gods] support, contradict, and argue with one another. They create a rich disorder. But the disjointedness of the portrait they form also speaks to trauma: how it can interrupt both chronology and one's sense of self."
      • premium: False
      • source: Michael Patrick Brady, The Millions
      • content: "Kumarasamy's writing is lush and evocative, capable of wresting beauty from sadness and finding slivers of hope amidst great tragedy . . . Akil Kumarasamy has written a book for our time and our place."
      • premium: False
      • source: Grace Z. Li, USA Today
      • content: "Flooded with inspired detail. Kumarasamy writes with precision, crafting prose that moves with the grace of poetry . . . A testament to Kumarasamy's talent for finding the most tender spots of the human soul."
      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        April 16, 2018
        In Kumarasamy’s debut collection of linked stories, a boy disappears in the wake of a storm, an entomologist stages an act of political resistance after his son disappears, and a pair of brothers go to Lake George with a young Sikh boy who changes both of their lives in different ways. At the center of it all is a family whose patriarch, Muthu, escaped Sri Lanka during the civil war and settled in New Jersey with his only surviving daughter, Nalini, who would later birth two sons, Arjun and Karna. Each gets his or her turn as the focus of a story. Nalini, who straddles both her father’s war-torn Sri Lanka and her sons’ suburban New Jersey, is easily the collection’s strongest character, embodying the tension between the two. Though, as a young woman, she seems to get it all right—she escapes from New Jersey, finds a loving husband and a big house—the lingering trauma of her past leads her to implode her marriage, sending her back to her father’s side. Kumarasamy’s prose is gorgeous and assured, capable of rendering both major tragedy (war, the dissolution of a marriage, the loss of a child) and minor tragedy (a botched effort at matchmaking, a pitying Christmas invitation) with care and precision. Though the stories can sometimes blend together, the writing is strong throughout, resulting in a wonderful, auspicious debut.

      • premium: True
      • source: Kirkus
      • content:

        May 1, 2018
        A collection of stories about a family for whom the Sri Lankan civil war is a constant backdrop.The Sri Lankan civil war, a bitter fight between the country's majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils, lasted for decades; tens of thousands of people died. In Kumarasamy's first book, that war is always present. At the center of these stories is a family: Nalini, her father, and her two sons, Arjun and Karna. During the war, Nalini's mother and twin brothers were brutally murdered. She and her father manage to flee to New Jersey, but the war, and their grief, follows close behind. Each story takes a different vantage point: In one of them, Nalini is a child, making friends in their dinky apartment complex; in another, she's a grown woman with teenage sons. The stories vary between characters' points of view as well as location and time. The result is a kaleidoscopic vision of a family. While the book is moving and the writing elegant and clear, the collection begins to feel almost like a writing exercise, moving from third-person to first-person and back; when it finally comes to the rarely used second person ("You are thirty but can pass for someone seven years younger"), the effect isn't nearly as surprising as it might otherwise have been. It might be that Kumarasamy's control on the stories is too tight. One wonders what might happen if she were to loosen her grip.An otherwise moving collection feels overly prescribed.

        COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

      • premium: True
      • source: Booklist
      • content:

        Starred review from May 1, 2018
        Kumarasamy's brilliant collection of interlinked short stories is a masterful combination of strong, insightful storytelling and tangential political commentary. With changing narrators, she travels across time and place?contemporary New Jersey, a Sri Lankan tea plantation on the eve of independence from Britain in 1948, Sri Lanka's turbulent civil war during 2008-09, and Calcutta during Bangladeshi turmoil. The themes are as ambitious in scope as the sprawling canvas as Kumarasamy captures the sense of dislocation that comes with imminent adulthood, political change, immigrant uncertainties, and a marriage in flux. Identity?individual, within a family, and in a community as an immigrant or refugee?is a constant thread, and her deftness in ensuring that religious and sexual elements all feel integral to each story deserves much credit. Arjun and Karna, the half gods of the title; their mother, Nalini; and their grandfather provide the pegs that anchor this must-read collection. The changing narrative voices and the back-and-forth between past and present leave the reader with a deep understanding of the lives of the two boys who start out on a tea plantation in Nuwara Eliya all those many years ago.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        February 1, 2018

        This collection from Kumarasamy, who won multiple awards at the Helen Zell Writers' Program at the University of Michigan, ranges across religious lines and from Calcutta to New Delhi to New Jersey as it follows the lives of a beleaguered Sri Lankan family.

        Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

popularity
0
publisher
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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