The WVU Press is excited to release this work of mixed-media fiction by Sejal Shah.
In the 11 linked short stories, Shah builds a shrine gleaming with memory and myth. Keys, rocks, photographs, fairy tales, fables and relics all add texture and meaning to an exploration of growing up and living as a diasporic Gujarati woman in a culture that excuses the behavior of men.
Throughout, girls and women contend with the expectations, limitations and challenges of becoming the heroine of one’s own life.
Shah’s follow-up to her award-winning essay collection “This Is One Way to Dance” continues the rich tradition of innovative feminist work by Claudia Rankine, Leslie Marmon Silko and Maxine Hong Kingston. By braiding stories and images with fictional letters to a beloved English teacher, the collection defies traditional autofiction, epistolary and short story conventions. These stories about friendship and love, resilience and survival establish Shah as an exciting new voice in contemporary fiction.
Deesha Philyaw, WVU Press author of “The Secret Lives of Church Ladies,” says the book’s “urgent, intense, and intimate stories…conjure memories and stir the soul,” describing the book as “a clever and beautifully crafted collection.” Rahul Mehta, author of “No Other World and Feeding the Ghosts,” describes the book as a “groundbreaking collection” that “will be a touchpoint for years and decades to come.”
Shah is an artist, dancer, poet, writer and teacher whose work crosses genres and disciplines. The daughter of immigrants from Kenya and India, she is the author of the award-winning essay collection “This Is One Way to Dance” and the groundbreaking essay on invisible disability and neurodiversity “Even If You Can’t See It.”
She lives in Rochester, New York.