WHERE TO CARRY THE SOUND
November 2024 | University of North Texas Press
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Winner, Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction
Silver Winner, Foreword INDIES Award in Short Stories
The stories in Where to Carry the Sound center on characters excavating their own lives: unearthing family secrets, exploring inherited silences, and rediscovering what might have seemed lost to them. Wherever these characters find themselves—including brewing bootleg liquor in Prohibition-era Bombay, finding remnants of a new language at an archaeological dig in Andhra Pradesh, seeking mirages above the Arctic Circle, or setting up an outpost on the moon—each seeks to reconcile a past continually bleeding into the present and to forge a path of belonging to carry them into the future.
PRAISE
"With clarity and tenderness, Where to Carry the Sound ushers readers into worlds that overturn the familiar to reveal the intimate truths beneath. Wherever Sudhakar takes us – from the moon to Bombay, the past to the future – she shows us that longing, grief, and love will always accompany us. These stories haunt and stun." —Janika Oza, author of A History of Burning, winner of the 2024 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature
“Where to Carry the Sound is a transportive collection of short stories where the characters unearth buried truths to find their own feminine strength, or shakti. Woven through the book is an absence of men—truant fathers, sleeping princes—but the women, whether bootleggers in Bombay or astronauts in space, grow and blossom into a feminine infinite they make their own. A gorgeously evocative collection that resonates long after the last page is turned.” —Dipika Mukherjee, author of Shambala Junction and Ode to Broken Things
"Sudhakar masterfully creates a mood in which anything feels possible, where magic lurks behind the quotidian. This assemblage of short fiction is emotionally enthralling and literarily inventive. An impressively crafted set of short stories, thoughtful and poetic."--Kirkus Reviews
“The stories in this debut short story collection are vividly imagined and original. They are rooted in realism, but this realism is exotic. They are tales of enchantment, with elements of speculative fiction, folklore, magical realism, science fiction, and none of the endings are predictable. . . . To sum up, I loved it!”--India Currents