CANR
WORK TITLE: All the Names They Used for God
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.anjalisachdeva.com/
CITY: Pittsburgh
STATE: PA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
LAST VOLUME:
Stories of the Transcendent and the Tangible: An Interview with Anjali Sachdeva
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Graduated from Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and writing instructor. Creative Nonfiction Foundation, Pittsburgh, PA, director of educational programs, worked for six years; University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Composition Program instructor. Has taught creative writing at the University of Iowa, Augustana College, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Pittsburgh.
WRITINGS
Contributor to journals, including the Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, Yale Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Literary Review, and Best American Nonrequired Reading.
SIDELIGHTS
Anjali Sachdeva is a writer and writing instructor. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has taught creative writing at the University of Iowa, Augustana College, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Pittsburgh. Sachdeva served for six years as director of educational programs with the Creative Nonfiction Foundation. Sachdeva has contributed fiction to a number of journals, including the Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, Yale Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Literary Review, and Best American Nonrequired Reading.
Sachdeva published the short story collection All the Names They Used for God in 2018. The nine stories in the collection center on the relationship between the characters and the divine. They strive for something greater than their current situation through hope in stories that are set all around the world.
A contributor to Kirkus Reviews said that this “otherworldly debut” is “beautiful, draining—and entirely unforgettable.” The same reviewer noted that “they are enormous stories, not in length but in ambition, each an entirely new, unsparing world.” A Publishers Weekly contributor remarked that “these inventive stories will challenge readers to rethink how people cope with thwarted hopes.” A contributor to the Book Chatter Website claimed that the stories in the collection “are deep and convoluted” and “force the reader to ponder serious questions.” The reviewer concluded that “the title is so appropriate because there is so much we cannot quite perfectly describe but feel, and many ascribe it to Gods or higher being. I would highly recommend reading this.” A contributor to the Char’s Horror Corner Website insisted that “Pleiades” and “Manus” “elevated this book to something really special,” adding: “I highly recommend this book to fans of literary and speculative fiction.”
Reviewing the collection on the PopMatters website, Jenny Bhatt noted that “one of the delightful aspects of this collection is that the people, times, and places are from various parts of world.” Bhatt reasoned that “overall, Sachdeva’s openings are not always strong but almost all her endings artfully leave space for the reader’s mind to linger, wonder, and imagine what might happen next. She’s at her best when describing a protagonist’s close encounters with the mystical and in near-otherworldly settings.” Nevertheless, Bhatt found All the Names They Used for God to be “a promising introduction to a fine writer from whom we will see, let us hope, bolder, riskier, more magical storytelling in the future.” A contributor to the Leave Me Alone I Am Reading and Reviewing blog declared that “Sachdeva is clearly talented in her craft. I usually do not care for the genre magical realism, but this author makes me realize that the genre is about the human condition and how we are conditioned to feel,” appending that “all the stories in this collection have a unique and thought-provoking prose.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 2017, review of All the Names They Used for God.
Publishers Weekly, December 4, 2017, review of All the Names They Used for God.
ONLINE
Anjali Sachdeva Website, https://www.anjalisachdeva.com (March 21, 2018).
Book Chatter, http://www.book-chatter.com/ (February 5, 2018), review of All the Names They Used for God.
Char’s Horror Corner, http://charlene.booklikes.com/ (February 9, 2018), review of All the Names They Used for God.
Composition Program, University of Pittsburgh Website, http://www.composition.pitt.edu/ (March 21, 2018), author profile.
Creative Nonfiction Foundation Website, https://www.creativenonfiction.org/ (March 21, 2018), author profile.
Leave Me Alone I Am Reading and Reviewing, https://books6259.wordpress.com/ (November 24, 2017), review of All the Names They Used for God.
PopMatters, https://www.popmatters.com/ ( February 22, 2018 ), Jenny Bhatt, review of All the Names They Used for God.
Anjali Sachdeva’s fiction has appeared in The Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, Yale Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Literary Review, and Best American Nonrequired Reading. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has taught writing at the University of Iowa, Augustana College, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Pittsburgh. She also worked for six years at the Creative Nonfiction Foundation, where she was Director of Educational Programs. She has hiked through the backcountry of Canada, Iceland, Kenya, Mexico, and the United States, and spent much of her childhood reading fantasy novels and waiting to be whisked away to an alternate universe. Instead, she lives in Pittsburgh, which is pretty wonderful as far as places in this universe go.
Anjali Sachdeva
Contributor
Anjali Sachdeva teaches English and creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh, and writes both fiction and nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Yale Review, Gulf Coast, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Best American Nonrequired Reading, among others.
Anjali Sachdeva’s fiction has appeared in The Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, The Yale Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Literary Review, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has taught writing at the University of Iowa, Augustana College, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Pittsburgh. She also worked for six years at the Creative Nonfiction Foundation, where she was director of educational programs. She has hiked through the backcountry of Canada, Iceland, Kenya, Mexico, and the United States, and spent much of her childhood reading fantasy novels and waiting to be whisked away to an alternate universe. Instead, she lives in Pittsburgh, which is pretty wonderful as far as places in this universe go. This is her first book.
Anjali Sachdeva
Anjali Sachdeva’s fiction has appeared in The Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, Yale Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Literary Review, and Best American Nonrequired Reading. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has taught writing at the University of Iowa, Augustana College, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Pittsburgh. She also worked for six years at the Creative Nonfiction Foundation, where she was Director of Educational Programs. She has hiked through the backcountry of Canada, Iceland, Kenya, Mexico, and the United States, and spent much of her childhood reading fantasy novels and waiting to be whisked away to an alternate universe. Instead, she lives in Pittsburgh, which is pretty wonderful as far as places in this universe go.
Anjali Sachdeva
CONTACT
Lecturer
CL 617-N
sachdeva@pitt.edu
Anjali Sachdeva teaches Grant Writing, Written Professional Communication, and Writing for the Public, along with Seminar in Composition, and Seminar in Composition: Education. She also teaches in the Writing Program.
Sachdeva, Anjali: ALL THE NAMES THEY USED FOR GOD
Kirkus Reviews. (Dec. 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Sachdeva, Anjali ALL THE NAMES THEY USED FOR GOD Spiegel & Grau (Adult Fiction) $26.00 2, 20 ISBN: 978-0-399-59300-0
So rich they read like dreams--or, more often, nightmares--the nine stories in Sachdeva's otherworldly debut center upon the unforgiving forces that determine the shape of our lives, as glorious as they are brutal.
"Wonder and terror meet at the horizon, and we walk the knife-edge between them," Sachdeva writes in her brief introduction; this is the world of her stories. There are no merciless gods here, not like in the olden days; instead, there is "science, nature, psychology, industry." But these modern forces are as vast and incomprehensible as any gods were. The stories that follow span time, space, and logic: Nigeria and New Hampshire, the past and the future, realism and science fiction. And yet, for all its scope, it is a strikingly unified collection, with each story reading like a poem, or a fable, staring into the unknowable. In "The World by Night," a lonely young woman in the Ozarks is abandoned--temporarily, and then forever--by her husband and finds dangerous refuge in a secret cave. "Logging Lake" follows a man in the midst of a post-breakup reinvention on the haunting date that will change the course of his life (whatever you're thinking, that's not it). "All the Names for God" follows two Nigerian women now forging "normal" adult lives after having been kidnapped as teens by extremists, their unimaginable history intertwined with the struggles of acclimating to the world they used to know. Equal parts cinematic and nauseating, the dystopian "Manus" is set in a world invaded by alien "Masters," who demand, as part of their dominion, that human citizens undergo "re-handing"--a painless procedure that replaces hands with metal forks, required for everyone, sooner or later. They are enormous stories, not in length but in ambition, each an entirely new, unsparing world.
Beautiful, draining--and entirely unforgettable.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Sachdeva, Anjali: ALL THE NAMES THEY USED FOR GOD." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A518491346/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3907c744. Accessed 10 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A518491346
All the Names They Used for God
Anjali Sachdeva. Spiegel & Grau, $26 (272p) ISBN 978-0-399-59300-0
The nine stories in Sachdeva’s intriguing debut collection raise challenging questions about human responses to short-circuited desires. Equally at home in realistic and speculative plots, Sachdeva crafts precise character studies with minimal flourishes. “Anything You Might Want” follows the quick crumbling of the relationship between the daughter of a rich, controlling Montana magnate and an indebted miner, and her tantalizing opportunity for revenge. “Robert Greenman and the Mermaid” also focuses on an unwise emotional attachment, bringing together a laconic fisherman and an actual mermaid who nets his ship the largest catches in years. Some stories are creative riffs on historic events, including the title story, in which two kidnapping victims of Boko Haram discover a quasimagical form of hypnosis that can control men. Others, such as “Manus,” point to alarming futures, in which aliens have conquered earth without upsetting life too much—other than requiring all humans replace their hands with metal prosthetics. The most affecting story, “Pleiades,” updates the hubris of Greek tragedy: the inexplicable illnesses of genetically modified septuplets undercut their parents’ faith in science. Throughout, characters face a perpetual constraint against full expression of their emotions. These inventive stories will challenge readers to rethink how people cope with thwarted hopes. (Feb.)
DETAILS
Reviewed on: 12/04/2017
Release date: 02/20/2018
ALL THE NAMES THEY USED FOR GOD: STORIES BY ANJALI SACHDEVA ~ BOOK REVIEW
FEBRUARY 5, 2018 MARIE 2 COMMENTS
Pages: 272
Expected Publication Date: February 20, 2018
Format: E-book from Netgalley
“Wonder and terror meet at the horizon, and we walk the knife-edge between them.” These words end the introduction to this powerful, haunting collection of short stories. Sachdeva explains in her introduction that in old times people knew better than to trust their gods. “Gods” enter these stories in unexpected, sometimes wondrous and sometimes terrifying ways. I put “gods” in quotations because what enters into these stories is never called god or what is expected of god, but instead is a force, a magical entity, something otherworldly that is hard to put a name to.
Sachdeva’s stories take place in many locations around the globe and at many different time periods, some past, others present and one in a horrific dystopian future. Sometimes this magical presence offers harm or mischief into the character’s life and at other times it offers comfort, but most often both occur. Even when this magical entity is helping the characters out of a horrible situation, there is a terrible flip side to it. For example, the young women kidnapped in Abuja are able to fool their captors by looking into their eyes and hypnotizing them. They continue to use this skill in their lives as they evade not only their captors, but to their advantage to steal from others. And on a deeper level, even though they have escaped their captors, they can never return home as the innocent young girls they were. They have irrevocably changed. In another story, a newly-wed fisherman becomes enamored of the mermaid he encounters off the coast of Newfoundland. However, as his enamorment of the mermaid grows, the rest of the world fades in beauty and interest for him. Now, this mermaid is in love with a giant great white shark and sings to bring fish to the shark so he will be well fed and not wish to eat her. This makes the fisherman extremely successful when fishing in these parts, however, there is an extremely disturbing development when tropical fish begin to fill their nets.
These stories are deep and convoluted. They force the reader to ponder serious questions. There are dark mysterious forces at work within these stories, but such ethereal beauty as well. I thought these stories were incredibly well conceived and executed. There is something unnerving and unsettling about them that touches upon something real that is hard to put into words. The title is so appropriate because there is so much we cannot quite perfectly describe but feel, and many ascribe it to Gods or higher being. I would highly recommend reading this!
All the Names They Used For God by Anjali Sachdeva
10:34 am 9 February 2018
All the Names They Used for God: Stories - Anjali Sachdeva
ALL THE NAMES THEY USED FOR GOD is a collection of short literary fiction stories, the last two of which were absolutely brilliant.
The tales in this book are all over the place, but I think it's all the different facets of humanity that link them all together. No two stories here are even remotely alike and I enjoyed that diversity.
Among my favorites were:
LOGGING LAKE which involved a strange happening at an ill advised campsite.
ALL THE NAMES THEY USED FOR GOD which was a heartbreaking story of two young girls who were kidnapped and forever changed by it.
ROBERT GREENMAN AND THE MERMAID: Once we glimpse something fantastic,(in the true sense of the word), it is very difficult to let it go.
MANUS was probably my favorite story here. After so many tales involving ordinary life, here's one that is totally out of left field. Gripping, poignant, and so creative-I'll never look at a human hand in the same way again.
And finally, PLEIADES: I don't even know what to say about this story. It's powerful, beautifully written and well told. I doubt anyone could read it and remain unmoved.
I liked the tales in this collection, but until the last two I didn't feel that this volume was anything special. MANUS and PLEIADES elevated this book to something really special in my eyes, and I highly recommend this book to fans of literary and speculative fiction.
*Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the free e-ARC in exchange for my honest review. This is it.*
**Also, thanks to my fellow book blogger Cody for turning me on to this collection. You can find his excellent reviews here: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/56352820-cody-codysbookshelf **
The Promise of Redemption in 'All the Names They Used for God'
JENNY BHATT 22 Feb 2018
THIS DEBUT COLLECTION OF STORIES BY ANJALI SACHDEVA EXPLORES HOW OUR NEW GODS ARE JUST AS UNTRUSTWORTHY AND CAPRICIOUS AS THE OLD ONES.
LOOK INSIDE ALL THE NAMES THEY USED FOR GOD
ANJALI SACHDEVA
Spiegel & Grau
Feb 2018
OTHER
Redemption — the act of being saved or saving something — is the central doctrine of most religions and one that is not only blindly believed but also often pursued in paradoxically destructive ways. Whether rooted in the desire to be delivered from the penalties of personal sins or those of the larger world, this mysterious hope for salvation is also, often, a driving conviction within the traditionally non-religious person in the form of a glittering and elusive promise of wholeness within oneself.
In her striking debut short story collection, All the Names They Used for God, Anjali Sachdeva's characters also reach for various kinds of redemption—inexplicable, undefined, mystical, even sublime. That reach propels them into curious liminal spaces that are not exactly darkly terrifying or horrific, as one might expect, but rather enchanting and mesmerizing.
In her introduction, Sachdeva writes about the difference between how people approached their gods in the old times versus how they do now. She posits that, in present times, there are higher expectations and ideals regarding transcendence and, when these are not easily met by religion, people turn to science, technology, nature, etc. But these new gods are, of course, just as untrustworthy and capricious as the old ones.
That introduction and some of the subsequent stories call to mind Neil Gaiman's American Gods (William Morrow, 2017), which is about how immigrants to any new place bring their old gods/spirits with them and how their belief systems weaken/alter so that new gods representing new obsessions with things like media, celebrity, technology, drugs, etc., take over and mostly lead to unfavorable ends. However, Sachdeva's descriptions of the new gods her characters pursue is not quite so bleak.
Though Sachdeva's nine stories cannot be called cheerful exactly, the protagonists are all driven by some kind of hope. Their individual journeys are almost like the spiritual phenomenon of ascension (entering heaven alive, without dying.) Each one seems to have his/her own version of a place or state of being that is heaven-like or god-like—one that is not even clear to them, yet enticing them on with intermingled fear and desire. It,s rather mysterious to us readers, too, but we are compelled to root for them to get there, which they somehow do eventually.
One of the delightful aspects of this collection is that the people, times, and places are from various parts of world: from war-ridden Nigeria to ocean-bound Newfoundland; from medieval England to an urban American near-future; and from a wintry American prairie to a seething Egyptian desert.
A particular standout is the story, 'Glass-lung'. Set before WWI, it's about a Danish immigrant who has a terrible near-death accident while working in an American steel mill. He is widowed and, to support them both, his young daughter finds work as a museum curator's assistant. This curator convinces father and daughter to accompany him to the deserts of Egypt to find buried treasure. Father and daughter have their own reasons—the latter is in love with the curator while the former is, well, in love with a magical piece of fulgurite the curator owns. The desert works its particular charm on all of them in various ways but it is the old, damaged father who finds transcendence. With the father-daughter and curator-assistant relationships, Sachdeva's writing is carefully textured and nuanced. Each key scene—the steel mill accident, the desert thunderstorm—is also unfolded at just the right pace.
The opening story, 'The World by Night', is another gem for similar reasons, especially the intricate word pictures of the subterranean caves.
The title story is based on the 2014 kidnapping of the Nigerian schoolgirls by the terrorist group, Boko Haram. It follows the lives of two schoolgirls through their captivity and beyond. It would be impossible to point out why it did not work as well as it should have without giving away significant plot details, so we will leave it there.
Intriguingly, with each story, the protagonist has a helper who is integral to the plot for that very role. Barring maybe three exceptions, that helper is another human being without any supernatural abilities. It's interesting to see how this fits in with Sachdeva's introductory points about seeking transcendence with new gods. The implication is, perhaps, that such seekers cannot get too far in their quests without help from others.
Overall, Sachdeva's openings are not always strong but almost all her endings artfully leave space for the reader's mind to linger, wonder, and imagine what might happen next. She's at her best when describing a protagonist's close encounters with the mystical and in near-otherworldly settings: the fisherman and the mermaid in the ocean, the near-blind woman in the underground caves, the glass-lunged invalid in the desert storm, etc. Still, those pivotal moments could have been richer, could have transported readers more intensely into those spaces/worlds if the language/sentences had been more enthralling, more spellbinding. It seems as if the writer restrained herself and, consequently, her characters. In fact, some of the stories are even reminiscent of Aimee Bender's and Kelly Link's excellent speculative works, but not entirely as captivating.
That said, the book has received accolades from several well-respected writers: Anthony Doerr, Chris Offutt, Dave Eggers, Kelly Link, Kevin Brockmeier, Carmen Maria Machado, and Karen Joy Fowler. That's high praise indeed and, perhaps, it raises expectations rather too much.
Storytelling is also, of course, a way of reaching for redemption. We try to give narrative coherence to the events, fictional or real, of a life so that some meaning or purpose emerges. We hope that the ability of a story to yield such meaning or purpose does not end with its crafting or reading and that it will, eventually, drive some sort of cognitive reframing among those who encounter it. In a world still torn apart brutally by old-school religion ideologies and dogma, it's fascinating to peer closer at the powers and glories of the many newer forces drawing us toward them. This collection of stories does just that. It's a promising introduction to a fine writer from whom we will see, let us hope, bolder, riskier, more magical storytelling in the future.
“All The Names They Used for God: Stories” by Anjali Sachdeva
“All The Names They Used for God: Stories” by Anjali Sachdeva
NOVEMBER 24, 2017
MARTIE
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publisher: Random House
Pub.Date: February 20, 201835082451
Possible Spoilers
With this title, I was expecting a novel about the horrors that have been committed in the name of God, such as the Spanish Inquisition. But the title is misleading. The stories are more about the concept of how we see God or any power that can change our lives. This stellar collection is exploring humanity’s strangeness. The stories read as ominous and compelling fiction that I would call magical realism. The author, Anjali Sachdeva, is ridiculously creative in writing unusual and dark tales. After each story, I thought “How bizarre.” Still, after each story, I felt that the author hit a nerve, making the plot acceptable, even moving.
The title story presents stirring images of Nigerian schoolgirls who are kidnapped by jihadists. The story goes back and forth between the time they are abducted till they are adult women. It is so darn sad. As adults, they gain some sort of mystical power over the men who abducted them and they are no longer being abused. But it is too late. They have been beaten and raped too many times over the years. They no longer feel human. It leaves the reader wondering what is left when one survives the un-survivable. This story made me simultaneously think: Is surviving even worth it when the cost is that you lose your soul? And, hoping that in real life, battered women are able to find a way to leave their abusers and still keep their human core.
Dave Eggers, who wrote the best selling non-fiction “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” said Sachdeva’s short story “Pleiades” is “a masterpiece.” Indeed, it is one of my favorites in this collection of heartbreaking stories. This one is about a couple who are geneticists. Ignoring the protesters holding signs that read “Seven Deadly Sins” and “Frankenstein’s Children,” they produce seven test-tube sisters that grow to become loving and inseparable. Unfortunately, over their childhood, teens, and womanhood they are all ill-fated. Making the reader either hate or sympathize with the grieving parents. I kept going back and forth thinking that they were thoughtless parents-to-be, thinking only of their careers. Then to wondering that they were no different from other loving parents-to-be who also happened to be trailblazing scientists.
In “Robert Greenman and the Mermaid,” there is a fisherman, a mermaid, and a shark. Of course, the fisherman is bewitched by the mermaid. What makes this story so original is the shark. The mermaid loves to watch the big fish feed on its prey. She feels that the shark represents all that is beautiful in the deep sea. The fisherman wants nothing more than to escape or kill the twenty-foot long hunter. It is a sweet sad story leaving you to ponder why humans are so afraid of anything different from themselves.
The story that creeped me out the most and haunts me still is “Manus.” In this story, aliens replace human hands with metal appendages. This neatly sums up this story, but without producing the Heebie Jeebies feeling. The aliens are called The Masters. The story begins with a couple looking at their neighbor when he is opening his mail and begins to cry. He’s just received his draft card. In this story, getting a draft card means that within two weeks, you must go for an “Exchange Apparatus,” known to humans as the “Forker.” For the surgery, the human holds out their hands and inserts them into pneumatic cuffs that shut around their wrists. After removing, the hands are replaced with metal fingers that look like forks. Ugh. When it is time for the man in the couple to be forked, I actually wept for him. When it is his girlfriend’s turn, she rebels. She does not get forked. However, to keep her body metal free she self-mutilates. Leaving her body just as gross (I won’t explain more so you can be just as shocked as I was) as if she was forked, shades of the title story, was it worth it?
Sachdeva is clearly talented in her craft. I usually do not care for the genre magical realism, but this author makes me realize that the genre is about the human condition and how we are conditioned to feel. I so enjoyed the book, “Love in the Time of Cholera,” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which I am now guessing is magical realism. I suspect this reviewer must examine the genre more carefully. Nevertheless, there are other stories in the collection also showing the damaging results of abusive power. All the stories in this collection have a unique and thought-provoking prose. Just know that she also writes like Rod Serling on an acid trip.
I received this novel from the publisher at no cost in exchange for an honest review.