Category Archives: Canadian Asian Pacific American
Swimming in the Monsoon Sea by Shyam Selvadurai + Author Interview [in The Bloomsbury Review]
Searching for Home
Shyam Selvadurai Debuts Swimming in the Monsoon Sea
While ‘home’ today for Shyam Selvadurai is undoubtedly Toronto, Canada, the ‘home’ that he plumbs for his books remains Sri Lanka, where he was born and lived until the age of 19. Selvadurai’s latest, Swimming in the Monsoon Sea – his first for young adult readers – returns to the Sri Lanka of his youth, a time before the bloody riots between majority Buddhist Sinhalese and minority Hindu Tamils precipitated the immigration of Selvadurai’s mixed Sinhalese/Tamil family to Canada two decades ago.
While Selvadurai originally thought he might find a life in the theater, the resounding success in 1994 of his first book, Funny Boy, about a young boy’s growing up gay in Sri Lanka where homosexuality is still illegal, cemented Selvadurai’s writing career. He followed in 1998 with Cinnamon Gardens, exploring the intertwined lives of the residents in a Colombo suburb of 1920s Ceylon which was then not-yet-independent Sri Lanka. Earlier this year, he edited the much acclaimed anthology, Story-Wallah: Short Fiction from South Asian Writers, capturing the diasporic South Asian experience through voices as diverse as Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Michael Ondaatje and many others.
Debuting this fall, Selvadurai’s lush Swimming centers on 14-year-old Amrith, an orphan lovingly raised within the family of his mother’s schoolfriend, and what will mostly likely be the last summer of childhood when a new relationship with a mysterious cousin from Canada changes his life forever. …[click here for more]
Author interview: The Bloomsbury Review, January/February 2006
Tidbit: Shyam Selvadurai was a guest at SALTAF 2005 (South Asian Literary and Theater Arts Festival), a much-anticipated, highly-attended annual fall event sponsored by the Smithsonian APA Program and NetSAP-DC. Mark your calendars for SALTAF 2009 on November 7, 2009!
Readers: Young Adult, Adult
Published: 2005 Continue reading
Swimming in the Monsoon Sea by Shyam Selvadurai + Author Interview [in AsianWeek]
Shyam Selvadurai’s ‘Swimming’ Debut
While “home” today for Shyam Selvadurai is undoubtedly Toronto, Canada, the “home” that he plumbs for his books remains Sri Lanka, where he was born, and lived there until the age of 19. Selvadurai’s latest, Swimming in the Monsoon Sea – his first for young adult readers – returns to the Sri Lanka of his youth, a time before the bloody riots between majority Buddhist Sinhalese and minority Hindu Tamils, which precipitated the immigration of Selvadurai’s mixed Sinhalese/Tamil family to Canada two decades ago.
While Selvadurai originally thought he might find a life in theater, the resounding success of his 1994 first book, Funny Boy, about a young boy’s growing up gay in Sri Lanka where homosexuality is still illegal, cemented Selvadurai’s writing career. He followed in 1998 with Cinnamon Gardens, exploring the intertwined lives of the residents in a Colombo suburb of 1920s Ceylon, which was then not-yet-independent Sri Lanka. Earlier this year, he edited the much-acclaimed anthology, Story-Wallah: Short Fiction from South Asian Writers, capturing the diasporic South Asian experience featuring such diverse voices as Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Michael Ondaatje.
Selvadurai’s lush Swimming, which debuted this month, introduces 14-year-old Amrith, an orphan lovingly raised within the family of his mother’s schoolfriend, and what will mostly likely be his last summer of childhood, when a new relationship with a mysterious cousin from Canada changes his life forever.
AsianWeek: Tell me about writing your first young adult book?
Shyam Selvadurai: Out of all the books I’ve written so far, writing Swimming in the Monsoon Sea was my favorite writing experience. I really loved my editor. … She laid down limits as to what YA fiction was and what a teenager could process and was interested in. I think I am a writer who really responds well to limits and, since writing this book, I have begun to wonder if I am really a genre writer masquerading as a literary one. All of which to say, I think I will definitely write more YA in the future. Perhaps even give up writing adult fiction altogether! …[click here for more]
Author interview: “Shyam Selvadurai’s ‘Swimming’ Debut,” AsianWeek, November 18, 2005
Tidbit: Shyam Selvadurai was a guest at SALTAF 2005 (South Asian Literary and Theater Arts Festival), a much-anticipated, highly-attended annual fall event sponsored by the Smithsonian APA Program and NetSAP-DC. Mark your calendars for SALTAF 2009 on November 7, 2009!
Readers: Young Adult, Adult
Published: 2005 Continue reading
Shooting Water: A Mother-Daughter Journey and the Making of a Film by Devyani Saltzman, afterword by Deepa Mehta
The turbulent mother-daughter relationship between world-renowned filmmaker Deepa Mehta and her photographer/journalist daughter is interwoven into a fascinating account of how Mehta’s latest film, Water, came to be. As the final installment of Mehta’s highly controversial Elements trilogy – Fire, Earth and Water – this film took five years to make, with Mehta and crew surviving violent protests (including effigy burnings and even a hired suicide specialist) in India to finally complete the film in a secret location in Sri Lanka. Both book and film are the noteworthy results of a monumental struggle.
Review: “New and Notable Books,” AsianWeek, November 3, 2005
Readers: Young Adult, Adult
Published: 2005 (United States) Continue reading
Deadly Slipper: A Novel of Death in the Dordogne by Michelle Wan
Nineteen years after her twin’s unsolved disappearance, Mara Dunn finds her sister’s camera in a junk sale. Its final roll of film – of rare orchids – offers a definitive path of clues. With the reluctant assistance of a local orchid specialist, she finally learns her sister’s fate. Just one question – what is “cock[ing] an Oriental eye” supposed to mean?!
Review: “New and Notable Books,” AsianWeek, August 4, 2005
Readers: Adult
Published: 2005 Continue reading
He Drown She in the Sea by Shani Mootoo
This one is just delicious – and delightfully plotted as to how it plays with time and place and people. The beginning: a man, a woman, her husband, her daughter. Fast backward to the man and woman and their intertwined childhoods until the woman’s father unjustly banishes the then-boy. Thankfully in the end – in this case, the middle, as well – true love triumphs.
Review: “New and Notable Books,” AsianWeek, August 4, 2005
Readers: Adult
Published: 2005 Continue reading
Midnight at the Dragon Café by Judy Fong Bates
Su-Jen becomes “Annie” when she immigrates to Canada at age 6 with her mother. Her father has set up a Chinese restaurant, and in the small Ontario town in the 1960s, the Chous are the only Chinese family. Su-Jen adapts and flourishes, but her mother becomes emotionally isolated. The arrival of Su-Jen’s much older half-brother upsets the already precarious family balance, and the young Su-Jen becomes the keeper of unsaid secrets and betrayals. This is one impressive debut novel.
Review: “New and Notable Books, AsianWeek, May 5, 2005
Readers: Adult
Published: 2005 Continue reading
Maya Running by Anjali Banerjee
As the only South Asian in her middle school, Maya knows all about being different in her tiny Canadian town. She doesn’t speak Bengali, she’s at that awkward stage of pimples and endless limbs, she doesn’t want to move to California, and she’s madly in love with the coolest boy in her school who just might like her back. When her perfectly gorgeous cousin, Pinky, arrives from India to exacerbate Maya’s insecuritiesl, Maya prays to Pinky’s round-bellied Hindu elephant god, Ganesh, for help. She goes through a 13 Going on 30 sort of transformation, without the fast-forward, literally becoming an assertive, multilingual, overnight beauty. But then, getting her wishes granted is just the beginning to realizing what she really wants in life.
Review: “New and Notable Books,” AsianWeek, February 25, 2005
Readers: Middle Grade
Published: 2005 Continue reading
The In-Between World of Vikram Lall by M.G. Vassanji
Calling himself “quite an ordinary man” even as he tops his country’s List of Shame, Vikram Lall recounts four decades of his “in-between” life in Kenya. A third-generation African of Asian Indian descent, he is not African enough, and certainly not on par with the ruling whites. A horrific childhood tragedy determines the rest of his life, leading him eventually into hiding in faraway Canada.
Review: “New and Notable Books,” AsianWeek, October 28, 2004
Readers: Adult
Published: 2004 Continue reading
One Hundred Million Hearts by Kerri Sakamoto
Miyo, raised by her indulgent father after her mother’s death, is shocked to discover her father’s secret life when he passes away. She travels to Japan, to meet a half-sister she never before knew existed, and to piece together the events of her father’s life long before she was born.
Review: “New and Notable Books,” AsianWeek, February 6, 2004
Readers: Adult
Published: 2004 (United States) Continue reading
The Yoko Ono Project by Jean Yoon with Instruction Poems, Music, and Other Texts by Yoko Ono
Often hilarious, surprisingly poignant play which looks at the life and works of the all-too-often caricatured Yoko Ono, perhaps the more talented (gasp! dare we say that?) of the Lennon-Ono duo.
Review: “New and Notable Books,” AsianWeek, November 1, 2002
Readers: Young Adult, Adult
Published: 2002 Continue reading
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