Contemporary Authors

• Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race Coach House Books (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2017
• (As Nathan Ripley) Find You in the Dark Atria Books (New York, NY), 2018

https://lccn.loc.gov/2017479435 Ruthnum, Naben, author. Curry : eating, reading, and race / Naben Ruthnum. First edition. Toronto : Coach House Books, [2017]©2017 117 pages ; 20 cm. DS432.5 .R88 2017 ISBN: 9781552453513 (softcover)9781770565241 (pdf) 1. Find you in the dark https://lccn.loc.gov/2018004968 Ripley, Nathan, author. Find you in the dark / Nathan Ripley. First Atria Books hardcover edition. New York : Atria Books, June 2018. 1 online resource. ISBN: 9781501178221 () 2. Find you in the dark https://lccn.loc.gov/2017061805 Ripley, Nathan, author. Find you in the dark / Nathan Ripley. First Atria Books hardcover edition. New York : Atria Books, June 2018. pages cm PR9199.4.R557 F56 2018 ISBN: 9781501178207 (hardback)9781501178214 (paperback)

• Coach House Books - https://chbooks.com/Contributors/R/Ruthnum-Naben

  Naben Ruthnum won the Journey Prize for his short fiction, has been a National Post books columnist, and has written books and cultural criticism for the Globe and Mail, Hazlitt, and the Walrus. His crime fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Joyland, and his pseudonym Nathan Ripley's first novel will appear in 2018. Ruthnum lives in Toronto.

• Granta - https://granta.com/contributor/naben-ruthnum/

  Naben Ruthnum
  Naben Ruthnum’s first book, Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race was published by Coach House Books in 2017, and will be published in the UK in 2018. A forthcoming thriller, Find You In The Dark, will be released under the pseudonym Nathan Ripley in 2018. Ruthnum lives in Toronto.

• Asian Heritage in Canada - https://library.ryerson.ca/asianheritage/authors/naben-ruthnum/

  Naben Ruthnum

  Naben Ruthnum’s first monograph, Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race, is a critically acclaimed venture into memoir, literary criticism and sociology. A first-generation Mauritian-Canadian, Ruthnum spent his childhood and teen years in Kelowna, British Columbia. He earned an MA in English literature from McGill University in Montreal. His thesis, available online, is entitled Haunted Artworks: Oscar Wilde and the British Ghost Story. Ruthnum’s first novel, a psychological thriller called Find You in the Dark, is published under his pen name: Nathan Ripley. Ruthnum has written on books and culture for several Canadian newspapers and magazines. His crime fiction has been published in well-known journals. His short story, “Cinema Rex,” originally published in the literary magazine The Malahat Review, was the winner of the Writers’ Trust of Canada / McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize for 2013. Ruthnum lives in Toronto.
  Fiction (Thriller)
  Find You in the Dark

  By Nathan Ripley.
  Toronto: Simon & Schuster Canada, 2018.
  Forthcoming early March 2018
  Publisher’s Synopsis (from its website)

  In this chilling debut thriller, in the vein of Dexter and The Talented Mr. Ripley, a family man obsessed with digging up the undiscovered remains of serial killer victims catches the attention of a murderer prowling the streets of Seattle.

  Martin Reese is obsessed with murder.

  For years, he has been illegally buying police files on serial killers and studying them in depth, using them as guides to find missing bodies. He doesn’t take any souvenirs, just photos that he stores in an old laptop, and then he turns in the results to the police anonymously. Martin sees his work as a public service, a righting of wrongs that cops have continuously failed to do.

  Detective Sandra Whittal sees it differently. On a meteoric rise in police ranks due to her case-closing efficiency, Whittal is suspicious of the mysterious caller—the Finder, she names him—leading the police to the bodies. Even if the Finder isn’t the one leaving bodies behind, who’s to say that he won’t start soon?
  Non-Fiction
  Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race

  Toronto: Coach House Books, 2017.
  6th floor DS432.5 .R88 2017
  Publisher’s Synopsis (from its website)

  Curry is a dish that doesn’t quite exist, but, as this hilarious and sharp essay points out, a dish that doesn’t properly exist can have infinite, equally authentic variations.By grappling with novels, recipes, travelogues, pop culture, and his own background, Naben Ruthnum depicts how the distinctive taste of curry has often become maladroit shorthand for brown identity. With the sardonic wit of Gita Mehta’s Karma Cola and the refined, obsessive palette of Bill Buford’s Heat, Ruthnum sinks his teeth into the story of how the beloved flavour calcified into an aesthetic genre that limits the imaginations of writers, readers, and eaters. Following in the footsteps of Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands, Curry cracks open anew the staid narrative of an authentically Indian diasporic experience.
  Awards and Honours

  Anthology (Short story)

  “Cinema Rex” was first published in The Malahat Review. It won the 2013 Journey Prize. It appeared in The Journey Prize: Stories: The Best of Canada’s New Writers (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2013), p. 123-156.
  9th floor PS8329.J68
  Links

  Naben Ruthnum personal Twitter presence

  Publisher Coach House Books

  Publisher Simon & Schuster Canada

• The Fold - http://thefoldcanada.org/speakers/naben-ruthnum/

  Naben Ruthnum’s first book, Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race came out with Coach House Books in 2017, and will be published in the UK by Text in 2018. His pseudonym Nathan Ripley’s upcoming thriller, Find You In The Dark, will be published by Simon & Schuster Canada, Atria, and Text 2018. Ruthnum is a winner of the Journey Prize, and lives in the Parkdale neighbourhood of Toronto.

• Southern Food Ways - https://www.southernfoodways.org/featured-contributor-naben-ruthnum/

  Featured Contributor Naben Ruthnum
  June 15, 2018

  In his 2017 book, Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race, Naben Ruthnum argues that too much writing about South Asia— and too much thinking about people of the Indian diaspora—tends to use curry as a simple cliché for a complicated range of ingredients, tastes, and identities. The SFA asked him to apply that same notion to writing and thinking about the American South—an equally complicated place often rendered in the language of moonlight and magnolias, of Grandma’s lard can and Aunt Sissy’s biscuits. The result was a lecture that Ruthnum delivered as scholar-in-residence at this year’s Blackberry Farm Taste of the South. We’ve adapted it as a feature in this issue. Ruthum lives in Toronto, where he writes in a range of genres for a variety of Canadian and international publications. He will also speak at our Fall Symposium.

  You write both fiction and nonfiction. What appeals to you about each of the two forms, and how (if at all) does one inform the other in your work?

  I started in fiction and it’s still the primary lens through which I view the world—so when it came to writing critical prose, and then other forms of essayistic nonfiction, I had a sense that the story was still the thing. I still find myself creating a narrative, even when I’m writing a book review. Fiction will always be my primary home, whether I’m writing a literary short story or a crime novel, but there is something about nonfiction that allows writers to access a different audience, to communicate with a certain kind of directness that I really enjoy.

  How did you decide to write your new thriller, Find You in the Dark, under the pseudonym Nathan Ripley?

  I came up with that pseudonym back when I was a teenager, because it’s a longstanding tradition for writers who work in different genres to use different names—not everyone does it, but John Banville and Craig Davidson come to mind as examples of writers who do. I wanted to write literary fiction and also thrillers, and it seemed that a transparent pseudonym was a good way of letting readers know what they were getting.

  Midway through my career, as I was starting to see expectations placed on me to write an immigrant fiction novel, or a book that fit loosely into that “currybook” category I talk about in my essay, I found another value to having a WASPy-sounding pseudonym. I felt, and I think there is at least some truth to this, that I was able to submit manuscripts and have people read them without expecting them to be a certain kind of story.

  You poke fun at what you call “currybooks,” but you clearly know the genre. If you had to pick a favorite currybook, what would it be?

  Ah! I think Monica Ali’s Brick Lane does a great job of using, then exploding, the currybook conventions. And as for an “immigrant novel” that shows how broad the category can be, and how distinct a book that fits into this category can be, I’d pick Akhil Sharma’s Family Life.

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Print Marked Items Find You in the Dark
Publishers Weekly.
265.16 (Apr. 16, 2018): p71. From Business Collection.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Find You in the Dark." Publishers Weekly, 16 Apr. 2018, p. 71. Business Collection,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536532704/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=dd07046e. Accessed 22 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536532704
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Ripley, Nathan: FIND YOU IN THE DARK
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 15, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Ripley, Nathan: FIND YOU IN THE DARK." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2018. Book Review
Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534375236/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=ddf1800d. Accessed 22 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A534375236
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Naben Ruthnum: Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race
World Literature Today.
92.2 (March-April 2018): p87. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Naben Ruthnum: Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race." World Literature Today, vol. 92, no. 2,
2018, p. 87. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A529356937 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=e4e6c9f6. Accessed 22 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A529356937
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BOOK CLUB
The Courier-Mail (Brisbane, Queensland, Australia). (Apr. 28, 2018): News: p24. From GPS.
COPYRIGHT 2018 News Limited http://www.thecouriermail.news.com.au/
Full Text:
NON-FICTION CURRY: EATING, READING AND RACE NABEN RUTHNUM TEXT, $20 Curry, an extended essay by Canadian Naben Ruthnum, is part criticism and part humour. Of Indian descent, Ruthnum delves into the issue of commodification - particularly that of the South Asian diaspora in the West. As a food, curry serves as a metaphor to refer to the narrow and one- dimensional roles given to South Asians in our societies. Ruthnum takes aim at the "currybook" industry that exotifies the South Asian experience in order to make it palatable and pleasant for a Western market, relying on faux authenticity to do so. In demonstrating the pernicious effects of these stereotypes, Ruthnum argues that the South Asian community sometimes embraces and perpetuates the crude categorisations foisted upon them. Throughout Curry, Ruthnum's sharp critiques are tempered with comedy, personal stories and even recipes. Curry is a great example of incisive writing allowing esoteric issues to be easily understood.CASPAR WEBB
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"BOOK CLUB." Courier-Mail [Brisbane, Queensland, Australia], 28 Apr. 2018, p. 24. Gale
Power Search, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536434462/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=67af026f. Accessed 22 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536434462
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An utterly absorbing thriller
The Spectator (Hamilton, Ontario).
(Mar. 24, 2018): Arts and Entertainment: pG9. From GPS.
COPYRIGHT 2018 Torstar Syndication Services, a division of Toronto Star Newspapers Ltd. http://www.torstar.com
Full Text:
Byline: Tara Henley Special to the Spectator
These past few years have witnessed an explosion of interest in psychological thrillers, in the wake of the "grip-lit" mega-trend launched by bestsellers such as "The Girl on the Train" and "Gone Girl." We've seen countless chilling page-turners hit shelves, but few have captured the dark and twisted mind of a psychopath as well as Nathan Ripley's debut novel, "Find You in the Dark."
Nathan Ripley is the pseudonym for Journey Prize-winning Toronto writer Naben Ruthnum, whose stories and essays have appeared in the Walrus and Hazlitt, and who penned an acclaimed short memoir last year, "Curry: Eating, Reading and Race."
But the emerging talent truly hits his stride with "Find You in the Dark," a well-crafted crime novel that proves utterly absorbing. The suspenseful story follows Martin Reese, a rich, retired Seattle tech mogul who harbours a secret obsession with amateur police work. Since his wife's sister's disappearance two decades prior, Martin has painstakingly researched serial killers, bribing cops for files, retreating deep into the forest for top-secret digs and, eventually, locating the missing bodies of victims. His anonymous calls to alert authorities are equal parts braggadocio and scorn at the police for not doing their job.
Just as Martin closes in on the ultimate goal of his clandestine work - locating his sister-in-law's remains, and giving his wife closure - a wrench in his plans threatens to derail everything he's worked for. A deeply disturbing read, with vivid scenes and complex psychology.
Tara Henley is a writer and radio producer. CAPTION(S):
Naben Ruthnum is the pseudonym for author Nabeen Ruthnum. "Find You in the Dark," Simon and Schuster, 368 pages, $24.99
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"An utterly absorbing thriller." Spectator [Hamilton, Ontario], 24 Mar. 2018, p. G9. Gale Power
Search, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532079068/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=502d4ea5. Accessed 22 June 2018.
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Dirty deeds; This pseudonymous author's debut thriller is satisfyingly sinister, with each revelation more
disturbing than the next
Navneet Alang
Globe & Mail (Toronto, Canada).
(Mar. 24, 2018): News: p20. From Business Collection. COPYRIGHT 2018 The Globe and Mail Inc. http://www.globeandmail.com
Full Text:
Byline: NAVNEET ALANG
If there is a leitmotif that runs through the crime thriller, it is grime. Plunging into the depths of human evil, the griminess of the genre and its often damaged characters reminds us that grit and violence are part and parcel of human life, even though we might wish that weren't the case.
So it is with Find You in the Dark, the first thriller by author Nathan Ripley. Dirt is always a problem - a thing to be disturbed in just the right way, gotten rid of, or somehow escaped. Where the novel differs from others is that the grime that pervades the text is always counterbalanced by a sterile cleanliness - and at each point that the dirt is cleared away, what is revealed underneath is somehow more disturbing than what came before.
The book centres on tech mogul Martin Reese, who retired early and rich and now spends his spare time sifting through arcane clues as to the final whereabouts of young women murdered by serial killers. He then anonymously relays the location to police, claiming to be giving peace to still-grieving families, all the while admonishing the cops for their dereliction of duty.
It is at the outset an invocation of a mind not quite as clean as Martin's ostensible intentions, and as the novel unfolds it becomes clear that the protagonist is far from a mere good Samaritan. Few details drive this home as clearly as the fact that Reese is married to Ellen, whose own sister was taken by a serial killer 20 years prior to the events of the novel.
The inevitable complication is that in one of Reese's meticulous digs - each treated with an almost disturbing methodical precision - where only one 20-year-old corpse should have been, there is also a fresh one. Someone else calls in the find to police and claims it is time to stop merely finding bodies, and instead making them.
Teasing out both who is behind the new killings and the attempt to frame Reese drives the plot -
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and Ripley does an effective job of deploying Reese as an unreliable narrator. As a reader, one's loyalty will be tested - and possibly pushed over the edge. Reese is always on the brink of revealing himself as either a better or worse version of himself, and though the text jumps perspective between characters, one never quite gets a clear, moral evaluation of Reese - that task left up to the reader, with an effectively morally ambiguous ending.
Find You in the Dark is a fastpaced book that one can blow through in a weekend, but it isn't exactly a beach read. It is more akin to dark British crime TV dramas such as Broadchurch or Luther, satisfyingly sinister and unsettling in their explorations of the violent possibilities of humanity, better suited to a dull, rainy Sunday than to sand and surf.
The book does have it downsides, though, particularly the dialogue, which especially in the first half of the book can feel amateurish and clunky. The ending arrives suddenly, too, and perhaps a touch too neatly - yet it remains satisfying despite that.
Beyond its status as entertainment, however, it is difficult not to notice the allegory at work in the novel: Here is a Silicon Valley tech mogul convinced he is doing the right thing until it is revealed just how damaging his good intentions have been. The book is filled with dirt of a more digital kind, too: Characters are tracked using technology, and it's a timely reminder of how tech has shifted from gleaming jewel to troubled contemporary mess, and of how privacy has changed in just a short couple of decades.
Of course, if a reckoning with social media desperately needs literary treatment, the other hotbutton issue is identity, and here Find You in the Dark provides one more wrinkle: Nathan Ripley is in fact Toronto writer Naben Ruthnum. The pen name is of particular significance since Ruthnum's previous book was Curry, an exploration of so-called "currybooks" - immigrant fiction or narratives about cuisine that are unfairly grouped under identity, according to Ruthnum, and do readers and writers a disservice by unifying that which is actually quite disparate and diverse.
The pen name is thus an attempt to escape the inevitable baggage that comes with being a minority writer - something that my mere mention of the fact undercuts.
It is a fraught issue, however.
When one is a minority in an English-speaking country, an occasional thing you run into is someone who insists on pronouncing your name in an anglicized way, so that Sandhu becomes Sandoo, or Ruthnum becomes Ripley. I used to find this grating: Why should these people have to contort themselves and their monikers to the majority? Why not just ask people to learn how to pronounce the name properly, or do away with their prejudice?
But it's difficult to hold such a hard line when the dirt of prejudice and unfair categorization still sits like a layer over the literary world. It's not that the need to change a name is any less frustrating. It's just that it becomes more understandable, after the exhaustion of fighting bias for decades of one's life sets in.
Sometimes you don't want to make the name the thing - you just want to get on with life: raise your kids, get a job, or in the case of one Nathan Ripley, write a cracking good crime thriller with
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a few interesting resonances, and have it be seen as that and only that. On that front, Find You in the Dark succeeds admirably.
Navneet Alang is a technology and culture journalist based in Toronto.
Find You in the Dark BY NATHAN RIPLEY SIMON & SCHUSTER, 368 PAGES, $24.99
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Alang, Navneet. "Dirty deeds; This pseudonymous author's debut thriller is satisfyingly sinister,
with each revelation more disturbing than the next." Globe & Mail [Toronto, Canada], 24 Mar. 2018, p. 20. Business Collection, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532078121 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=e92a541d. Accessed 22 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532078121
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Ripley, Nathan. Find You in the Dark
Nanci Milone Hill
Xpress Reviews.
(May 4, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2018 Library Journals, LLC http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviews/xpress/884170-289/xpress_reviews- first_look_at_new.html.csp
Full Text:
Ripley, Nathan. Find You in the Dark. Atria. Jun. 2018. 368p. ISBN 9781501178207. $26; pap. ISBN 9781982100360. $18; ebk. ISBN 9781501178221. THRILLER
[DEBUT] Retired CEO Martin Reese has a gruesome hobby that he keeps secret from his family. His wife and daughter believe that he's been going camping solo for years. What he's really been doing is buying police files on serial killers and locating the missing bodies. Once he digs up their remains, he calls in an anonymous tip to the authorities. His most recent excavation hits close to home. It's the body of his sister-in-law, Tinsley, who has been missing for 20 years. Detectives Chris Gabriel and Sandra Whittal are not happy about the man they have dubbed the "Finder" and are obsessed with identifying him. Unfortunately, they're not the only ones on Martin's tail--a vicious serial killer doesn't appreciate Martin digging up his victims. While Gabriel and Whittal are not fully developed, the overall story depicting a murderer's manipulation and depravity is engrossing.
Verdict This debut thriller by the pseudonymous Ripley (Journey Prize winner Naben Ruthnum) is highly recommended for fans of Lee Child and C.J. Box.--Nanci Milone Hill, M.G. Parker Memorial Lib., Dracut, MA
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hill, Nanci Milone. "Ripley, Nathan. Find You in the Dark." Xpress Reviews, 4 May 2018. Book
Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A538858770/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=d79ff648. Accessed 22 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A538858770
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An utterly absorbing thriller
The Record (Kitchener, Ontario).
(Mar. 24, 2018): Arts and Entertainment: pD10. From GPS.
COPYRIGHT 2018 Torstar Syndication Services, a division of Toronto Star Newspapers Ltd. http://www.torstar.com
Full Text:
Byline: Tara Henley; Special to the Record
These past few years have witnessed an explosion of interest in psychological thrillers, in the wake of the "grip-lit" mega-trend launched by bestsellers such as "The Girl on the Train" and "Gone Girl." We've seen countless chilling page-turners hit shelves, but few have captured the dark and twisted mind of a psychopath as well as Nathan Ripley's debut novel, "Find You in the Dark."
Nathan Ripley is the pseudonym for Journey Prize-winning Toronto writer Naben Ruthnum, whose stories and essays have appeared in the Walrus and Hazlitt, and who penned an acclaimed short memoir last year, "Curry: Eating, Reading and Race."
But the emerging talent truly hits his stride with "Find You in the Dark,' a well-crafted crime novel that proves utterly absorbing. The suspenseful story follows Martin Reese, a rich, retired Seattle tech mogul who harbours a secret obsession with amateur police work. Since his wife's sister's disappearance two decades prior, Martin has painstakingly researched serial killers, bribing cops for files, retreating deep into the forest for top-secret digs and, eventually, locating the missing bodies of victims. .
Just as Martin closes in on the ultimate goal of his clandestine work - locating his sister-in-law's remains - a wrench is thrown into his plans.
Tara Henley is a writer and radio producer.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"An utterly absorbing thriller." Record [Kitchener, Ontario], 24 Mar. 2018, p. D10. Gale Power
Search, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532079303/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=f19aa612. Accessed 22 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532079303
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Curry's struggle worth the effort; Reading five-essay book is like watching author kick his way out of box taped shut
The Record (Kitchener, Ontario).
(Aug. 19, 2017): Lifestyle: pD4. From GPS.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Torstar Syndication Services, a division of Toronto Star Newspapers Ltd. http://www.torstar.com
Full Text:
Byline: Bert Archer; Special to the Record
Curry is a struggle. It's a struggle for the writer, who is trying to write his way out of a set of expectations and reflexes that stand between him, what he wants to write and how he wants to be read.
And it's a struggle for the reader, who has to dodge repeated authorial self-recriminations and second guesses.
Reading this small, five-essay book is like watching Naben Ruthnum, a Canadian-born writer of Indo-Mauritian heritage, try to kick his way out of a box that's been very neatly taped quite shut.
It's frustrating, and not always pleasant. There are moments when he gets a foot through and you think he's got it licked, only to realize his leg's now stuck, and he's no closer to getting out of that thing than he was when he started.
You may find yourself wishing he'd brought a utility knife with him.
But stick with it, because it's not a show you get to see often. Usually, people like Ruthnum - writers, actors, musicians, executives, customer service representatives, presidents who have an identity that is not cis, white, straight, able-bodied, and middle- or upper class - do their box- kicking backstage and only come out once they've managed to extricate themselves as much as they've been able. Sure, there are books and plays and TV shows about characters who struggle this way, but those are stories. Curry is life.
These essays - which join a political and cultural Zeitgeist that includes Kamal Al Solyalee's Brown, Aziz Ansari's Master of None, Kumail Nanjiani's The Big Sick, and Hasan Minhaj's standup - use food, travel, movies, literature and cookbooks to try to figure out, to paraphrase Sheila Heti, how should a South Asian person be.
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Ruthnum picks apart Jhumpa Lahiri, Rohinton Mistry, Daniyal Mueenudin, Shoba Narayan, Madhur Jaffrey, and "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle" with a thoughtful ambivalence that exhibits an admirable intellectual honesty.
Ruthnum, born in 1982, is at the beginning of his career, and his writing sometimes shows it. But he more than makes up for that and other infelicities (like his trouble with the definition of "disinterested") with ample evidence of real verbal acuity and, more importantly, sharp observation and analysis, as when he points out that books often "signal their falseness by underlining their authenticity," that Western urban dress was in his youth, as it is now, "so uniformly varied that individual distinctions became important only if you were looking through the crowd for someone you already knew," or that "curry's just as fake and as real as a great novel, as a sense of identity."
Ruthnum won the 2013 Journey Prize for his short story, "Cinema Rex," and will be publishing a crime novel under the pseudonym Nathan Ripley (the racial implications of which he discusses) next year.
Though Coach House Books' admirable Exploded Views series, which they describe as "punchy salvos," is about the only place I can imagine publishing something as unapologetically procedural as this, I hope Ruthnum doesn't leave non-fiction behind entirely. It's fun to watch him think.
CAPTION(S):
Naben Ruthnum, Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race, Coach House Press, 144 pages, $14.95.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Curry's struggle worth the effort; Reading five-essay book is like watching author kick his way
out of box taped shut." Record [Kitchener, Ontario], 19 Aug. 2017, p. D4. Gale Power Search, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501080600/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=02b2125a. Accessed 22 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A501080600
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Curry's struggle worth the effort; Reading five-essay book is like watching author kick his way out of box taped shut
The Spectator (Hamilton, Ontario).
(Aug. 19, 2017): Arts and Entertainment: pG9. From GPS.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Torstar Syndication Services, a division of Toronto Star Newspapers Ltd. http://www.torstar.com
Full Text:
Curry is a struggle. It's a struggle for the writer, who is trying to write his way out of a set of expectations and reflexes that stand between him, what he wants to write and how he wants to be read. And it's a struggle for the reader, who has to dodge repeated authorial self-recriminations and second guesses.
Reading this small, five-essay book is like watching Naben Ruthnum, a Canadian-born writer of Indo-Mauritian heritage, try to kick his way out of a box that's been very neatly taped quite shut.
It's frustrating, and not always pleasant. There are moments when he gets a foot through and you think he's got it licked, only to realize his leg's now stuck, and he's no closer to getting out of that thing than he was when he started. You may find yourself wishing he'd brought a utility knife with him.
But stick with it, because it's not a show you get to see often. Usually, people like Ruthnum - writers, actors, musicians, executives, customer service representatives, presidents who have an identity that is not cis, white, straight, able-bodied, and middle- or upper class - do their box- kicking backstage and only come out once they've managed to extricate themselves as much as they've been able. Sure, there are books and plays and TV shows about characters who struggle this way, but those are stories. Curry is life.
These essays - which join a political and cultural Zeitgeist that includes Kamal Al Solyalee's Brown, Aziz Ansari's Master of None, Kumail Nanjiani's The Big Sick, and Hasan Minhaj's standup - use food, travel, movies, literature and cookbooks to try to figure out, to paraphrase Sheila Heti, how should a South Asian person be.
Ruthnum picks apart Jhumpa Lahiri, Rohinton Mistry, Daniyal Mueenudin, Shoba Narayan, Madhur Jaffrey, and "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle" with a thoughtful ambivalence that exhibits an admirable intellectual honesty.
14 of 18 6/21/18, 11:56 PM

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Ruthnum, born in 1982, is at the beginning of his career, and his writing sometimes shows it. But he more than makes up for that and other infelicities (like his trouble with the definition of "disinterested") with ample evidence of real verbal acuity and, more importantly, sharp observation and analysis, as when he points out that books often "signal their falseness by underlining their authenticity," that Western urban dress was in his youth, as it is now, "so uniformly varied that individual distinctions became important only if you were looking through the crowd for someone you already knew," or that "curry's just as fake and as real as a great novel, as a sense of identity."
Ruthnum won the 2013 Journey Prize for his short story, "Cinema Rex," and will be publishing a crime novel under the pseudonym Nathan Ripley (the racial implications of which he discusses) next year. Though Coach House Books' admirable Exploded Views series, which they describe as "punchy salvos," is about the only place I can imagine publishing something as unapologetically procedural as this, I hope Ruthnum doesn't leave non-fiction behind entirely.
CAPTION(S):
Naben Ruthnum, Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race, Coach House Press, 144 pages, $14.95.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Curry's struggle worth the effort; Reading five-essay book is like watching author kick his way
out of box taped shut." Spectator [Hamilton, Ontario], 19 Aug. 2017, p. G9. Gale Power Search, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501080525/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=ef924e2b. Accessed 22 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A501080525
15 of 18 6/21/18, 11:56 PM

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How curry became synonymous with Indian identity; Curry is a melange of cultures and not a pure notion of homeland, author says
The Toronto Star (Toronto, Ontario).
(Aug. 18, 2017): Lifestyle: pE9. From GPS.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Torstar Syndication Services, a division of Toronto Star Newspapers Ltd. http://www.thestar.com/
Full Text:
Byline: Karon Liu Toronto Star
Many writers of South Asian descent living in the west feel the pressure to write what Toronto- based author Naben Ruthnum calls "the curry book," a formula about reconnecting with their ancestral roots in the east to find a better sense of self.
Ruthnum, the former books columnist for The National Post, who was born in Canada and has Indo-Mauritian roots, explores this idea in his new book of essays, Curry ($14.95, Coach House Books).
He uses the dish as a metaphor for how South Asian identity is represented in popular culture in modern times.
Over bowls of Macanese-style curry courtesy of my mom's recipe, we chatted about what makes curry authentic, the "curry book" phenomenon.
You come in hot at the beginning saying that curry isn't an authentic dish. Them's fighting words.
One of the interesting things about (Indian) curry is that one of its basic ingredients, chilies, are something that the Portuguese brought over. The story of curry is a mix of cultures from the beginning, but where it stands in food writing is that it tends to be this pure notion of the homeland when curry is truly a melange of different cultures.
The chapters often refer to something called the "curry book." Could you elaborate?
You often have a first or second-generation South Asian person who is enjoying western life, but still feels like there is something missing. Often it's that connection to their homeland and, often, that connection is through food, even if it isn't the main focus of the novel. I think there are a lot of books, good and bad, that play with those tropes.
16 of 18 6/21/18, 11:56 PM

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Writers talk about being on their own, learning their mothers' recipes and ending up bonding with their families and learning something about themselves. I have my own version of that story in the book that I included.
You'll see this in cookbooks that hinge on authenticity where the author talks about watching their grandmother cook. That's what gives the book its value to the consumers, it legitimizes the book.
Surely there are people who genuinely lived the "curry book" experience and aren't just pandering to publishers.
This is where it gets confusing. It would be insulting of me to say anybody that writes a book like this is being a hack for the market. It's just that it's been done so many times that it's become a genre of its own. A whole group of people's identity becoming a genre gives me the willies.
The argument I'm making in the book is that identity, brown identity in the west, is a complex thing. Our lived experiences are different whether we're from Brampton or Yellowknife, or if our grandparents are from Pakistan or Mauritius.
For readers, it's important to remember that writers are individuals and shouldn't be expected to cater to this genre. As a writer, you shouldn't be pressured to enter this genre.
Do you think curry is pigeonholed in a fixed time and place?
It's a dish that's rested in the old world and nostalgic ideas. If someone makes a modern or deconstructed curry, fusion enters the picture and it's suddenly not Indian or authentic anymore, even if it's cooked by an Indian guy at a Mumbai restaurant.
Interestingly enough, the curry books I refer to often have this image of India in the past, and it's about a displaced, western brown person trying to reconnect with this past.
Is the "curry book" a symptom of the publishing industry being historically white?
I know a lot of brown, Asian and Black people who work in publishing and I've seen writers of colour buy these (curry) books. I can't think of someone in Canadian publishing who is championing different ways of writing.
It's such a risk-adverse industry. Can we guarantee a few thousand sales from this first-time author? If a third-time author had two books that did well in a curry book format, and the third book they want is a legal thriller, is that gonna happen? I think there's a fear of risk, but of course, diversity always helps, too.
Authenticity is tricky, right? This curry we're eating is my mom's recipe, but she uses canned curry paste. Regardless, this is the first curry I remember eating and it's true to my childhood.
If we take your idea of authenticity, which is a personal truth and you associate what is important to your culture and upbringing, that's the authenticity that I'm interested in because it's unique to you. I'm gonna have to get a takeout box for this, by the way.
17 of 18 6/21/18, 11:56 PM

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Curry: Eating, Reading and Race comes out Aug. 21. karonliu@thestar.ca
43250320
CAPTION(S):
Karon Liu talks with author Naben Ruthnum about his new book Curry, which explores the dish and how it relates to South Asian identity.
Bernard Weil/Toronto Star
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"How curry became synonymous with Indian identity; Curry is a melange of cultures and not a
pure notion of homeland, author says." Toronto Star [Toronto, Ontario], 18 Aug. 2017, p. E9. Gale Power Search, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A500971439/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=fe06f899. Accessed 22 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A500971439
18 of 18 6/21/18, 11:56 PM

"Find You in the Dark." Publishers Weekly, 16 Apr. 2018, p. 71. Business Collection, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536532704/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=dd07046e. Accessed 22 June 2018. "Ripley, Nathan: FIND YOU IN THE DARK." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534375236/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=ddf1800d. Accessed 22 June 2018. "Naben Ruthnum: Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race." World Literature Today, vol. 92, no. 2, 2018, p. 87. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A529356937/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=e4e6c9f6. Accessed 22 June 2018. "BOOK CLUB." Courier-Mail [Brisbane, Queensland, Australia], 28 Apr. 2018, p. 24. Power Search, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536434462/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=67af026f. Accessed 22 June 2018. "An utterly absorbing thriller." Spectator [Hamilton, Ontario], 24 Mar. 2018, p. G9. Power Search, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532079068/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=502d4ea5. Accessed 22 June 2018. Alang, Navneet. "Dirty deeds; This pseudonymous author's debut thriller is satisfyingly sinister, with each revelation more disturbing than the next." Globe & Mail [Toronto, Canada], 24 Mar. 2018, p. 20. Business Collection, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532078121/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=e92a541d. Accessed 22 June 2018. Hill, Nanci Milone. "Ripley, Nathan. Find You in the Dark." Xpress Reviews, 4 May 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A538858770/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=d79ff648. Accessed 22 June 2018. "An utterly absorbing thriller." Record [Kitchener, Ontario], 24 Mar. 2018, p. D10. Power Search, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532079303/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=f19aa612. Accessed 22 June 2018. "Curry's struggle worth the effort; Reading five-essay book is like watching author kick his way out of box taped shut." Record [Kitchener, Ontario], 19 Aug. 2017, p. D4. Power Search, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501080600/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=02b2125a. Accessed 22 June 2018. "Curry's struggle worth the effort; Reading five-essay book is like watching author kick his way out of box taped shut." Spectator [Hamilton, Ontario], 19 Aug. 2017, p. G9. Power Search, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501080525/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=ef924e2b. Accessed 22 June 2018. "How curry became synonymous with Indian identity; Curry is a melange of cultures and not a pure notion of homeland, author says." Toronto Star [Toronto, Ontario], 18 Aug. 2017, p. E9. Power Search, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A500971439/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=fe06f899. Accessed 22 June 2018.

• The Star
  https://www.thestar.com/life/food_wine/2017/08/18/author-naben-ruthnum-talks-how-curry-became-synonymous-with-indian-identity.html
  Word count: 935

  Author Naben Ruthnum talks how curry became synonymous with Indian identity
  By Karon LiuFood Writer
  Fri., Aug. 18, 2017

  Many writers of South Asian descent living in the west feel the pressure to write what Toronto-based author Naben Ruthnum calls “the curry book,” a formula about reconnecting with their ancestral roots in the east to find a better sense of self.

  Ruthnum, the former books columnist for The National Post, who was born in Canada and has Indo-Mauritian roots, explores this idea in his new book of essays Curry ($14.95, Coach House Books). He uses the dish as a metaphor for how South Asian identity is represented in popular culture in modern times.
  Karon Liu talks with author Naben Ruthnum about his new book Curry, which explores the dish and how it relates to South Asian identity.
  Karon Liu talks with author Naben Ruthnum about his new book Curry, which explores the dish and how it relates to South Asian identity. (Bernard Weil / Toronto Star)

  Over bowls of Macanese-style curry courtesy of my mom’s recipe, we chatted about what makes curry authentic, the “curry book” phenomenon.

  You come in hot at the beginning saying that curry isn’t an authentic dish. Them’s fighting words.

  One of the interesting things about (Indian) curry is that one of its basic ingredients, chilies, are something that the Portuguese brought over. The story of curry is a mix of cultures from the beginning, but where it stands in food writing is that it tends to be this pure notion of the homeland when curry is truly a mélange of different cultures.

  Read more:Curry’s struggle worth the effort

  The chapters often refer to something called the “curry book.” Could you elaborate?

  You often have a first or second-generation South Asian person who is enjoying western life, but still feels like there is something missing. Often it’s that connection to their homeland and, often, that connection is through food, even if it isn’t the main focus of the novel. I think there are a lot of books, good and bad, that play with those tropes.

  Writers talk about being on their own, learning their mothers’ recipes and ending up bonding with their families and learning something about themselves. I have my own version of that story in the book that I included.

  You’ll see this in cookbooks that hinge on authenticity where the author talks about watching their grandmother cook. That’s what gives the book its value to the consumers, it legitimizes the book.

  Surely there are people who genuinely lived the “curry book” experience and aren’t just pandering to publishers.

  This is where it gets confusing. It would be insulting of me to say anybody that writes a book like this is being a hack for the market. It’s just that it’s been done so many times that it’s become a genre of its own. A whole group of people’s identity becoming a genre gives me the willies.

  The argument I’m making in the book is that identity, brown identity in the West, is a complex thing. Our lived experiences are different whether we’re from Brampton or Yellowknife, or if our grandparents are from Pakistan or Mauritius. For readers, it’s important to remember that writers are individuals and shouldn’t be expected to cater to this genre. As a writer, you shouldn’t be pressured to enter this genre.

  Do you think curry is pigeonholed in a fixed time and place?

  It’s a dish that’s rested in the old world and nostalgic ideas. If someone makes a modern or deconstructed curry, fusion enters the picture and it’s suddenly not Indian or authentic anymore, even if it’s cooked by an Indian guy at a Mumbai restaurant.

  Interestingly enough, the curry books I refer to often have this image of India in the past, and it's about a displaced, western brown person trying to reconnect with this past.

  Is the “curry book” a symptom of the publishing industry being historically white?

  I know a lot of brown, Asian and Black people who work in publishing and I’ve seen writers of colour buy these (curry) books. I can’t think of someone in Canadian publishing who is championing different ways of writing.

  It’s such a risk-adverse industry. Can we guarantee a few thousand sales from this first-time author? If a third-time author had two books that did well in a curry book format, and the third book they want is a legal thriller, is that gonna happen? I think there’s a fear of risk, but of course, diversity always helps, too.

  Authenticity is tricky, right? This curry we’re eating is my mom’s recipe, but she uses canned curry paste. Regardless, this is the first curry I remember eating and it’s true to my childhood.

  If we take your idea of authenticity, which is a personal truth and you associate what is important to your culture and upbringing, that’s the authenticity that I’m interested in because it’s unique to you. I’m gonna have to get a takeout box for this, by the way.

  Curry: Eating, Reading and Race comes out Aug. 21.

  karonliu@thestar.ca

• Electric Lit
  https://electricliterature.com/the-secret-life-of-curry-ad32a0ca3605
  Word count: 2350

  The Secret Life of Curry
  Naben Ruthnum writes about South Asian identity and literature by way of South Asian food
  Photo by Sara Marlowe

  What is a “currybook”? Canadian author Naben Ruthnum coined the term to describe a particular kind of diasporic writing that combines easy South Asian cultural touchpoints, swaths of old world nostalgia, and a vague sense of the exotic coalesce beneath a paperback cover — and is then mass-marketed towards both homesick immigrants and curious outsiders.

  Growing up in a Mauritian household in sleepy Kelowna, British Columbia, Ruthnum was always unimpressed by the warm rows of these currybooks — their covers tinted orange, plum, or persimmon — that he’d find lining his parents’ bookshelves. As he got older and settled into his career as a multi-genre fiction writer, he began to question his dislike of this particular type of “immigrant as identity” diasporic writing, as well as the publishing industry’s penchant for these so-called “sari and spice” affairs. In Curry, his debut for Coach House Books, Ruthnum set out to investigate his own fraught relationship with curry — as a spice, yes, but more so as a greater symbol of his own identity. He explores how eating curry, reading other writers’ thoughts on curry, and the racialized dynamic surrounding curry play into his own identity as a brown, diasporic writer.

  The book is a sort of jumble; it’s part memoir, part literary critique, part culinary history, and part rant, the sort of mashup that makes quite a lot of sense once one considers Ruthnum’s own varied writing background. He doesn’t hold back on his opinions of the more damaging or reductive tropes associated with his target, but pulls no punches when it comes to himself, either. Throughout Curry, Ruthnum grapples with his own prejudices — against currybooks, against their more exoticized, feminized counterparts (which he calls “mangobooks”), against the glut of diasporic novels that felt both too familiar and utterly foreign to his own experience. That penchant for clear-eyed self-interrogation keeps the book from feeling too polemical; instead, it makes Curry all the more accessible, steered as it is by an author who is, quite simply, working through his own shit.

  Discussing big, sensitive ideas like identity, authenticity, and the immigrant experience may be a tall order, but in Curry, Ruthnum digs in with gusto.

  Kim Kelly: The idea of the “currybook” and your conflicted feelings about the genre is a central theme of Curry. Could you break down what exactly a “currybook” is, and why they’ve become such a thorn in your side as a South Asian writer?

  Naben Ruthnum: “Currybook” is a term I had for a certain kind of diasporic brown novel when I was a teenager: the type I didn’t want to read. The way I describe these books in Curry is as “nostalgic, authenticity-seeking reconciliation-of-present-with-past family narratives,” and that tends to spur recognition in readers who know what I’m getting at: often, these books will have drifting red silks and a braid on the cover, or a scatter of powdered spices, maybe a mango or two. And often, as I discovered when reading this book, books that happen to adhere to these rough genre guidelines are well-crafted, heartfelt works of art, not just parroting of the “sari and spice novels” (a more popular term for currybooks) that have come before them.

  But the themes and relationships at the heart of these novels didn’t resonate with me as a writer — at least not across all of my work. Problem is, I did write one short story, “Cinema Rex,” that dealt with brown kids on the island of Mauritius in the 1950s and their subsequent, film-obsessed lives in the West as adults — classic ingredients for a currybook, and the first piece that garnered me any real attention from awards juries, publishers, and agents. Many of the people who liked that story were put off by the rest of my work, which ranges from thriller to literary fiction that isn’t always centered around brown protagonists. Pushing forward over the next few years as a writer, I realized that the pressure of expectation to create a literary persona and work that is recognizable as fitting into pre-existing versions of Western brownness, complete with tragic looking back, generational disconnect, and an inability to cook amma’s aloo gobi, was a real part of what was standing in the way of me getting to publish what I wanted.
  Wealth and Family in the New India

  Authors Vivek Shanbhag and Mihir Desai discuss a new literature for a country on the rise
  electricliterature.com

  KK: In the book, you talk a lot about the demands that are placed on brown writers by the publishing industry as well as the reading public — this sense of needing to either seamlessly assimilate or exoticize oneself. How do you think this way of thinking can be effectively challenged? How can the industry make more space for brown writers to be whoever they want to be?

  NR: That pressure to exoticize my writing and work in a way that is, funnily enough, actually asking me to conform to a pre-existing story template that we’ve read dozens of time before, a sort of prefab exotique, has been a dominant pressure in my career. The go-to answer to this problem tends to be getting more people of color in editorial boards and agencies. But, as I say in the book, it’s not simply white audiences who gravitate toward echoing, nostalgic stories of brown identity repeatedly: it’s a significant contingent of the brown audience as well, and readers of all backgrounds. So just getting an editor of color to read your book isn’t the magical fix-it to getting stories of unique brown identity in the West out there — or the stuff that I tend to write, which is clearly informed by my racial and class background, but doesn’t often plainly foreground issues of racial and cultural identity. I think the key to getting more space for stories out there is something like a serious version of what I’m doing with this book, where I make fun of and create discomfort in readers and publishing industry operatives who have an extremely narrow internal definition of “diversity.” It has to be an ongoing, and sometimes mean, discussion.

  The pressure to exoticize my writing and work is, funnily enough, actually asking me to conform to a pre-existing story template that we’ve read dozens of time before.

  KK: The subject of family consistently appears throughout the book, from your own Mauritian clan to the overarching concept of “authenticity.” How did writing this book lead you to interrogate your own relationship with family? What’s the most significant thing you learned as a result?

  NR: Family dynamics are so often at the heart of currybooks, good and bad, and there is a very recognizable pattern that many of these books tend to stick to, which often reflects the lived reality of their authors. You know what I’m going to write — conservative parents who don’t understand why their children are listening to rap and sometimes dating white people. I’m being wildly reductive here to get a point across, and that point is that the lived reality of some brown people in the West may fit this pattern — but bring individuality, class, education, artistic leanings, religion, isolation, generational distance from the subcontinent into it — and what you get is an incredible range of different parents and children interacting differently.

  For example, the scolding aunties that I see in certain novels are a type I recognize as real, a type that resonates with young South Asian people I’ve talked to — but the closest aunt in my family lived in London, is highly progressive and independent, and was taking me to bizarre Wooster Group plays when I was in university, encouraging me to think and write exactly what I wanted. That extended-family-disapproval thing was never a part of my life, while it’s embedded in the lives of many other brown Westerners.

  I did learn, as elsewhere in the process of researching this book, that my initial, childish dismissal of trope-heavy books by South Asians was immature and incorrect. There are truths about family relationships that don’t become any less true from being repeated: it’s just that there are other truths that I’d also like to read about, and they need to be published more often. There are also truths among the currybook tropes about family, nostalgia, and homecoming that are distinct, odd, and hyper-specific, that risk being lost as these books are marketed and promoted as belonging to one mass of shared experience.

  KK: The concept of curry is itself rooted in sociopolitical turmoil, stretching from the earliest days of the British Raj to the racism still experienced by South Asian people. How do we decolonize curry?

  NR: Pushback is embedded in curry’s recipe, I think. The chilies in Indian curries come from Portuguese traders centuries ago, planted on Indian soil to make commerce with Europe and elsewhere easier: but Indians took ownership of the spice through culinary ingenuity. Adapting the incredible variety of dishes that are classed under the curry banner to Mughal courts and the Raj afterwards expanded the definition while catering to certain palates, but there’s no sense of the colonist owning the dish — I feel that curry is a dish that has the world in it, a historical, evolving food that can’t perhaps ever be properly “decolonized,” but it can spur a discussion for just how complex and worth unpacking these terms and this insane history is. That discussion has to be about making these different historical and colonial paths to what’s on your plate known.

  I feel that curry is a dish that has the world in it, a historical, evolving food that can’t perhaps ever be properly “decolonized.”

  KK: Your discussion of Soniah Kamal’s essay “When My Authentic Is You Exotic” and the “mangobooks” seemed to hit a particular personal nerve, especially the idea of how diasporic brown people feel forced to police themselves to avoid falling into perceived stereotypes. What is at the root of your (and other brown writers’) professed dread of writing to “serve” white audiences?

  NR: I’ll speak for myself, but it’s probably a sentiment many brown writers share — the idea of serving your own banal existence as exotic to white readers, or, even worse, inventing a sense of connection to the past, or a sense of alienation that you might not properly feel in order to create an effect in a white reader that is based on seeing your name and author photo then reading a narrative about an orphan trying to reconnect with their severed homeland — is just plainly chilling.

  I certainly try not to let this get in my head too much. Despite having written this book, I do think it’s extremely important for my time spent writing fiction to take place inside my own head and in the story, as divorced from ideas of audience reception as possible. That’s part of what I was working out with Curry: exactly what it was I thought of all this stuff, and how I could find a way to have a career that didn’t involve me trying to outsmart industry expectations behind the scenes. Making my part of the discussion public seemed to be a good way to do both.
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  electricliterature.com

  KK: As a writer, what did you seek to accomplish by publishing this book? And now that it’s out, would you say you’ve achieved that goal?

  NR: Now that the debate about diversity in literature is loud and ongoing, it’s important to have disagreement-within-ranks about what constitutes diversity, and what the various problems in the industry may be. I had to work against this obstacle personally when it came trying to get my work published, because I kept running into a tacit definition of what brown writing looked like: a definition that my work didn’t fit into. “Being accepting of diverse narratives” risks morphing into an acceptance of “being accepting of THE diverse narrative,” whatever that may be for one’s insert-cultural-group here. Of course, writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie have already precisely nailed this problem, and in part, my book was just adding to the work they’ve already done — but the other thing I wanted to do with this piece was to joke, to suggest, to discomfit people, whether they be of color or not, into thinking about these issues for themselves, and not just seizing onto a solution that I myself never arrive at, in the book or in my own career.

  And I can’t forget the publishing-my-first-book part of the deal, especially because I’ve been fortunate enough to get press and reader attention for Curry. My selfishness as a writer, my desire to have books out across genres and to write for other mediums, is a motivation that I never want to underplay, and I think that’s useful in making the points I made the way I made them — in talking about the career and aims of an individual writer who is constantly confronted with a genre-cast mold of what he is supposed to writing, I’m telling to story of the racialized writer as an individual, not a type, not a category: a weird person shaped by race and class, certainly, but too many other important and trivial factors to enumerate.

• Chatelaine
  https://www.chatelaine.com/living/books/authentic-curry-book-naben-ruthnum/
  Word count: 917

  Is Your Curry ‘Authentic’? A New Book Explores Eating, Reading and Race
  Toronto writer Naben Ruthnum on the connection between home cooking and the lure of a perfect, nostalgic past
  by Sadiya Ansari Updated Sep 18, 2017

  curry

  When Toronto-based writer Naben Ruthnum wrote a story loosely based on his father’s upbringing in Mauritius, the enthusiastic response it received freaked him out. He worried it was because the piece fit so neatly into an established genre of South Asian diasporic fiction he calls “currybooks.” He even took on a pseudonym, Nathan Ripley, to avoid the expectation that he keep writing these types of stories. Then Ruthnum started to question his active avoidance of the genre: Just because a scene of a second-generation Indian attempting to cook curry like his or her mom’s appears in countless books doesn’t make it less of a real experience.

  All of this led him to write a book on the subject, Curry: Eating, Reading and Race, released last month. Ruthnum spoke with Chatelaine about his obsession with curry and why mothers are so central to any story about it. Bonus: He shared his favourite recipe with us — his mother’s Homecoming Shrimp Curry.

  Why are you so preoccupied with curry?

  Curry has the same metaphoric power as wine. It can mean so many things to so many people, especially when you’re talking about brown people and culture, and how we’re perceived by other brown people, by ourselves, and by white majority culture. At its most basic, curry is a blend of so many elements: chili peppers brought by the Portuguese from the Caribbean, local Indian spices, and the influences of the British and Mughal occupiers of the area. It just became the perfect way for me to talk about writing and culture and how we’re looked at.

  What is a “currybook” exactly?

  A currybook is always defined by some sort nostalgia. It’s often a first- or second-generation brown person in the West who is feeling distanced from their homeland and past, [and having] unsettled feelings in their day-to-day life. And often the arc of a currybook involves reconciling a life in the West, with all its contradictions, with a really pure version of the old country.

  Those are just the broad strokes — there are so many variations of these and in providing that description I’m being really reductive of some books that are really good, like The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri.

  The Best Fall Reads: 35 Books To Curl Up With This Season
  The Best Fall Reads: 35 Books To Curl Up With This Season

  Why did you avoid reading and writing currybooks?

  It wasn’t conscious, I was just writing the stories and ideas that came to me. One of them happened to be heavily based in my father’s story, but the resistance became active when I realized that’s what people wanted from me. It’s hard because I wanted to expand that story into a novel, and then I realized that people were hyper-focused on me doing that — the few people who were paying attention to my career at all. Any interest in other stories I wrote, many of which I thought were better, was tempered by, “yeah, when you’re finished with that, get back to what you’re supposed to do.” And it kind of gave me the creeps — that you’re programmed to follow this very certain career path or you don’t get a career.

  A lot of the book is about authenticity and the idea that just because something is a trope doesn’t mean it’s not authentic and real. What does authentic mean to you?

  Using the phrase authentic and saying curry isn’t authentic is me sort of being provocative. There is a sense of realness and truth when brown people are looking back to the home country, whatever the home country might be. So when I’m saying something like curry isn’t authentic because it’s a product of all these centuries of exchange and colonialism and history, what I’m saying is our lived brown lives in North America or in the U.K. are just as authentic as that.

  Let’s talk about the role of mothers in curry creation. I’m Pakistani and my litmus test for authenticity is if someone’s mom made it. Why are mothers so central to curry?

  That was something that came up with my editor [Emily Keeler] when discussing the book, and I think she put it better than I do when she said that it really minimizes [mothers’] roles in narratives, just to literally have them in the kitchen producing. However, there’s a real part of that that’s true to my childhood. That’s certainly not everything my mother was, but a primary part of my memories was that she was the provider of food in my household.

  In these stories, your inability to cook your mother’s curry the way she does becomes a stand-in for your inability to remove yourself from your Western life and completely occupy this perfect nostalgic past through food. For a lot of people, both in real life and in stories, mothers do symbolize that link to the past.

• The Lifted Brow
  https://www.theliftedbrow.com/liftedbrow/2018/4/13/not-another-brown-nostalgia-tale-a-review-of-naben-ruthnums-curry-eating-reading-and-race-by-sonia-nair
  Word count: 2501

  ‘Not Another Brown Nostalgia Tale: A Review of Naben Ruthnum’s “Curry: Eating, Reading and Race”’, by Sonia Nair
  April 13, 2018

  Whichever corner of the world you find yourself in, there is nothing as immediately synonymous with South Asian cultural identity as curry. Restaurants specialising in food hailing from the subcontinent more often than not have the word ‘curry’ in their titles – Curry Café, Punjabi Curry Café and Curry Vault are a few I can recall just off the top of my head. McCormick’s Keen’s Traditional Curry Powder is a proud pantry staple for Australians wishing to recreate the heady flavours of a curry in the safe confines of their home. On the other end of the spectrum, the derogatory term ‘curry muncher’ and accusations that they ‘smell like curry’ are levelled to exclude and demonise people of South Asian origin.

  But despite it being the catchall for South Asians, curry doesn’t exist. Or at least it didn’t exist in its current permutation until machinations of international trade and centuries of colonial rule made it so. As Sucharita Kanjilal writes in Quartz India, the homogenised term ‘curry’ is a figment of the British colonial imagination that reinforces imperialist power structures every time it is used in an Indian context:

  The continued use of a colonial term to categorise a complex nation is both reductive and factually flawed. It takes a country, obscures it and creates an imagined community on the coloniser’s own terms.

  In his razor-sharp, searing book Curry: Eating, Reading and Race, Canadian writer Naben Ruthnum similarly argues that a singular South Asian literary narrative doesn’t exist. Despite common themes of connection, nostalgia and homecoming pervading many diasporic narratives for a reason – they are truths that constitute the lived experience of many a South Asian migrant – neverending stereotypical encounters with just one story means they become the only story, and one static narrative can’t possibly begin to capture the multiplicities inherent in the fifteen-million strong South Asian diaspora.
  Despite it being the catchall for South Asians, curry doesn’t exist

  Ruthnum coins the term ‘currybooks’ to describe an explosion of literary works where salvation for the displaced South Asian person in the West is only possible amid the banyan trees, clutched mangoes and tangled red silk saris of the subcontinent. His loose definition for this genre is “nostalgic, authenticity-seeking reconciliation-of-present-with-past family narratives”.

  “And if you’re a brown writer, it will be presumed to be your default genre, and you’d best recognise that”, writes Ruthnum on the strictures the publishing industry places on South Asian writers. Ruthnum is well aware of these limitations, publishing thrillers under the pseudonym Nathan Ripley to allow himself to “come to people’s desks under a different identity that’s not associated with his racial background”.

  Stock standard meditations on the overlap between personal and familial identity find as much of an adoring audience in white readers who crave the exoticism of a faraway, mysterious land as they do in brown readers who seek a salve to their feelings of alienation – tales of a heritage rediscovered, secrets unearthed and the mystical properties of spices are a dime a dozen in a genre that counts Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Shilpi Somaya Gowda and Monica Pradhan as some of its most well-known authors.

  Ruthnum kicks off his book with a mawkish ode to the country of his parents’ birth, Mauritius, which he visited for the first time at the age of nine. He recounts the oppressive heat, the unanticipated Hindu funeral of his grandmother and curry “that left a sting that lasted”. We expect this lilting reverie to continue as it charts the minutiae of the immigrant’s homecoming experience, and its subsequent revelatory qualities, but Ruthnum proceeds to pull the rug out from under us – challenging the common tropes we’ve come to expect from the classic diasporic South Asian novel:

  There’s no comfort or Truth to be found in my story of ‘going home’: only a series of incidents that revealed how isolated from the country of my family’s origin, how Westernised, I was at the time and, in many ways, still am.

  In a way, this book is very much for South Asians like me – that is, South Asians who have no tangible connection to the “core that we scattered from” but who, by virtue of inherited brown skin, belong to one of largest diasporas in the world. Our family history could not be more different, but like Ruthnum – whose antecedents’ migration path landed them in labour and administrative roles in Mauritius – my cultural identity can only be considered in light of the journey that propelled my grandparents, alongside hordes of other South Indian migrants lured by contract labour arrangements in rubber plantations and the promise of better life, to the British-colonised Malaya.

  Curry: Eating, Reading and Race is divided into the three sections that make up its title. In ‘Eating’, Ruthnum traces the historical and contemporary truths that shape the elusive, evolving identity of curry, informed as it is by the centuries of continual adaption and spirit of reinvention. But the very idea of curry has a vastly different meaning for multiple hyphenated first- and second-gens like myself and Ruthnum if compared to a native-born Indian such as Kanjilal.

  “Walk into a grocery store in India and you find that the singular curry powder does not exist, neither as material nor idea. In India, we use endless varieties of spice mixes instead”, Kanjilal writes in her excoriating takedown of the concept of curry.

  And yet, commercial masala mixes such as Baba’s Curry Powder and Alagappa’s Curry Powder are staples in many Malaysian-Indian households (though they are a few steps up from Keen’s). The comforting green-clad packets of Baba’s Meat Curry Powder filled my suitcase to the brim when I relocated from Kuala Lumpur to Melbourne. They’re not ‘one-size-fits-all’ curry powders – variations range from meat and fish ones to sambar and rasam mixes – but they are still broad stand-ins for the thousands of different regional varieties of spice concoctions that constitute dishes in India. Ruthnum concedes as much in ‘Eating’ when he observes that every diasporic kitchen that he’s ever entered has curry powder.
  Even my tolerance to spice, which I pride myself on, has roots that lie outside India

  As I’ve written about elsewhere, food is one of the few ways I feel unabashedly Indian. But if the elusive colonial construct of curry is one of the defining elements of the way I perceive myself as being Indian, how Indian am I really? Even my tolerance to spice, which I pride myself on, has roots that lie outside India – Ruthnum notes that chillies were transported from the Caribbean by Portuguese traders. They’re not native to India. And neither am I.

  In ‘Reading’, Ruthnum highlights outliers to currybooks – Romesh Gunsekera’s Reef, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight Children, Anita Desai’s In Custody and Gita Mehta’s Karma Cole, to name a few – but they’re all written by authors belonging to South Asian diasporas in the UK and the US.

  Closer to home, an advent of writing produced in Australia by writers of South Asian descent, as far as Ruthnum’s definition of currybooks go, are far removed from the nostalgic, reductive and clichéd narratives that Ruthnum derides. Sri Lankan-Australian writer Michelle de Kretser’s award-winning books interrogate questions of identity and dislocation, while Goan-Anglo-Indian writer Michelle Cahill’s recent short story collection Letter to Pessoa transports readers from one disparate milieu to another. Singaporean-Australian writer Balli Jaswal’s latest work Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows delves into the womanhood and sexuality of older Sikh women in a creative writing class.

  But this wasn’t always the case. As Nicholas Jose writes on The Wheeler Centre blog, “imaginative engagement with the Asia Pacific region, despite its proximity, has been limited in Australia’s literary past”:

  The cultural cringe was about Europe, and that’s where literary ambition and creative energy were directed. When Asia was a subject, it was usually to mark distance and difference…Even in sensitive and well-intentioned hands, otherness has been the predominant trope.

  The romanticised place the homeland occupies in diasporic narratives owes itself, in part, to the physical and psychological distance that used to lie between the country of birth and the adopted country of choice. Before video calls and social media, as well as cheaper and quicker flight paths closed the gap between disparate locations, New Delhi-based poet and professor Makarand Paranjape says the “motherland remained frozen in the diasporic imagination as a sort of sacred site or symbol, almost like an idol of memory and imagination…Because a physical return was virtually impossible, an emotional or spiritual renewal was an ongoing necessity.”
  The romanticised place the homeland occupies in diasporic narratives owes itself [to the] distance that used to lie between the country of birth and the adopted country of choice

  Second-generation Indian-Australian writer Mena Abdullah was born in a time before Skype and Facebook bridged the distance between Australia and her parents’ homeland, but her collection of short stories The Time of the Peacock (1965) challenges straightforward understandings of what it meant to belong to an Indian diaspora during this time. A child narrator called Nimmi lies at the centre of all the stories – through her eyes, we bear witness to the fondness and longing with which her parents regard India. In one of the stories, however, Nimmi watches on as her Australian-born cousin Hussainbreaks rank with his Muslim father due to his desire to marry a Christian girl called Anne. Here, the alienation of being a migrant in a foreign country isn’t as acute as age-old cultural conflicts that have been transposed from India to Australia.

  More recently, Roanna Gonsalves writes about the discombobulating experience of belonging to the Catholic Indian diaspora in Sydney in her short story collection The Permanent Resident (2016). Although Gonsalves’ characters, as Yen-Rong Wong observes in her review in The Lifted Brow Review of Books, share the common sensation of “looking, and sounding foreign in a country they are not sure wants them in the first place”, their homecoming process is inverted as they migrate from India to Australia in search of that elusive sense of peace and belonging. For many of Gonsalves’ characters, being Catholic Bombayites is an inextricable part of their identity – such as in the chilling ‘Christmas 2012’ where the Albuquerques enjoy spicy turkey and the revealing ‘In the Beginning Was the Word’ where Angelina D’Costa steps foot in a church five years after renouncing Catholicism – but for others, it is simply an aside. Sunita in ‘Straight, No Chaser’ is a divorcee simply seeking absolution in a nightclub; Nitin and Nalini in ‘Friending and Trending’ suffer a loss they’ll only grasp the significance of later. Each of these characters left India for different reasons, and while not all of them encounter happy endings in Sydney, their salve is never “the ancestral tonic of a voyage east”.

  Although Sri Lankan-Australian writer Su Dharmapala’s second novel Saree (2014) may dip in and out of the currybook genre, her first novel Wedding Season (2012) is anything but. Revolving around four city-dwelling Australian girls where three of them are of Sri Lankan heritage, the story chronicles their travails as they negotiate racism and sexism in the workplace, mental illness, and the weight of cultural expectations. There are sarees, curries and attempted arranged marriages, but the motherland is only evoked once and never spoken about with the spirit of rediscovery or homecoming so characteristic of currybooks – it is simply another place the girls visit in the novel. By allowing her characters to transcend the stereotype that they are lacking in some way because of their juggling of two identities at once, Dharmapala adroitly captures the experience of being a migrant, but one that is highly particular to the vagaries of the Sri Lankan-Australian experience.

  None of these narratives concern themselves with the pursuit of authenticity under an orientalist, western gaze – instead, to borrow Ruthnum’s words, these multifaceted narratives are “differentiated immigrant existences, ways of being and tasting that aren’t about pursuing the lost, truthful flavours of generations past”.

  The pervasiveness of the term ‘curry’ is something that we can control no more than we can control the immutable forces of transnational movement and colonisation that gave birth to the expression in the first place. But the homogeneity that erases nuance in favour of uniformity doesn’t have to be reflected in our ‘currybooks’ if we take a leaf out of Ruthnum’s book and see curry for what it actually is – “an ever-inauthentic mass of dishes that is a close parallel to the formation of South Asian diasporic identity”.

  In Curry: Eating, Reading and Race, Ruthnum has written a currybook – the word ‘curry’ certainly appears more times than one could count – but it’s one where he explores what it means to be a brown person on his own terms. It’s not a brown nostalgia tale. There are no mangoes. There are no scattered cardamom seeds. There are curries, but they include the incongruous ingredients of kale and sour cream, and Ruthnum cooks them not to reimagine his childhood and practise age-old Indian cooking techniques, but to feed himself.
  It’s not a brown nostalgia tale. There are no mangoes. There are no scattered cardamom seeds

  By defying what ingredients he’s expected to put into his curries, what he’s expected to read and what he should write about, Ruthnum issues to other brown writers a call to arms to break out of the box that the west insists on putting them in:

  The realities of racism and the white majority dominance of life in the west defines how brown people are seen, how they must act, and what they are allowed to achieve – but this doesn’t need to limit our imagination of ourselves, or lessen the distinctness and individual nature of experience, especially as expressed in art, in memoir. As brown people in the west, out stories don’t have to explain ourselves to white people, or to each other – they don’t have to explain shit.

  Sonia Nair is a Melbourne-based writer and critic who has been published by The Wheeler Centre, Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings and Metro. She blogs about how she never follows her food intolerances at www.whateverfloatsyourbloat.com and tweets @son_nair.
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• The Star
  https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/2018/03/16/nathan-ripleys-debut-thriller-proves-dark-twisted-and-utterly-absorbing.html
  Word count: 423

  Nathan Ripley’s debut thriller proves dark, twisted — and utterly absorbing
  By Tara HenleySpecial to the Star
  Fri., March 16, 2018
  Find You in the Dark - Nathan Ripley
  Nathan Ripley is the pseudonyn for author Naben Ruthnum, who wrote an acclaimed short memoir last year, Curry: Eating, Reading and Race.
  Nathan Ripley is the pseudonyn for author Naben Ruthnum, who wrote an acclaimed short memoir last year, Curry: Eating, Reading and Race. (Bernard Weil / Toronto Star File Photo)

  This past few years have witnessed an explosion of interest in psychological thrillers, in the wake of the “grip-lit” mega-trend launched by bestsellers such as The Girl on the Train and Gone Girl. We’ve seen countless chilling page-turners hit shelves, but few have captured the dark and twisted mind of a psychopath as well as Nathan Ripley’s debut novel Find You in the Dark.

  Nathan Ripley is the pseudonym for Journey Prize-winning Toronto writer Naben Ruthnum, whose stories and essays have appeared in The Walrus and Hazlitt, and who penned an acclaimed short memoir last year, Curry: Eating, Reading and Race with Coach House Books’ Exploded Views series.

  But the emerging talent truly hits his stride with Find You in the Dark, a well-crafted crime novel that proves utterly absorbing. The suspenseful story follows Martin Reese, a rich, retired Seattle tech mogul who harbours a secret obsession with amateur police work. Since his wife’s sister’s disappearance two decades prior, Martin has painstakingly researched serial killers, bribing cops for files, retreating deep into the forest for top-secret digs, and, eventually, locating the missing bodies of victims. His anonymous calls to alert authorities are equal parts braggadocio for scoring the find and scorn at the police for not doing their job.

  Just as Martin closes in on the ultimate goal of his clandestine work —locating his sister-in-law’s remains, and giving his wife closure — a wrench in his plans threatens to derail everything he’s worked for. As he races against the clock, and the fast-paced investigative work of Sandra Whittal, a brilliant young detective, Martin is forced to gamble everything he cares about. Including his own sanity.

  A deeply disturbing read, with vivid scenes and complex psychology, Find You in the Dark lingers long after the last page has been devoured. And Ripley proves a stellar addition to the Canadian crime novel scene. An addictive debut.

  Tara Henley is a writer and radio producer

• Bookshelf
  https://bookshelf.ca/article/view/694
  Word count: 348

  REVIEW: FIND YOU IN THE DARK
  Article By Andrew Hood
  Date: 4 Mar 2018
  Related...
  Find You in the Dark
  For years, Martin Reese, a retiree who made his nut in tech, has been meticulously unearthing serial killers' loose ends, the remains of victims the cops weren't able to recover.

  As Martin sees it, he's bringing closure to these girls' families, an act so purely altruistic, in his estimation, that he rewards himself with a gloating, castigating call to the authorities after each success. While most people, cops and civilians alike, see the value of Martin's vigilantism, his hubris comes to rub a couple of the wrong people the wrong way. Detective Sandra Whittal is certain that there's something dangerous at the root of The Finder's (Whittal's sobriquet) supposed munificence, while someone else, who's been watching Martin's smug hunt from the sidelines, doesn't like that the hidden past is being disturbed.

  The last body Martin hopes to find is his wife's sister, Tinsley, disappeared by Jason Shurn twenty years ago. Working from a never-released interview bought from an otherwise worthless desk cop, Martin is certain he's decoded a throwaway clue and found his sister-in-law. Cocksure at his final triumph, Martin exhumes the grave only to find fresh horror piled on top of old, a fresh body amidst the old ones. What he hoped to end has been renewed. His supposed effort to bring closure to his family risks tearing it apart.

  In Find You in the Dark, Nathan Ripley (AKA Naben Ruthnum) conjures three sharp, cunning obsessives and pits them against each other. Martin's complicated motives for bringing up the bodies meets its match in Sandra's mixed drive to both be right and do right, and their traditional cat and mouse taunt is ratcheted up by the fangy presence of the watching shadow on the periphery, The Ragman. Ripley overlaps and twists these three, forming loose loops that he gradually, deftly, and thrillingly tighten into an impressive and firm knot.
  Go To Page Turners & Pot Boilers

• Quill and Quire
  https://quillandquire.com/authors/how-nathan-ripley-subverts-genre-conventions-in-his-debut-thriller-find-you-in-the-dark/
  Word count: 648

  How Nathan Ripley subverts genre conventions in his debut thriller, Find You in the Dark

  “Most serial-killer books just aren’t very good,” says author Naben Ruthnum.

  This rather jaundiced assessment notwithstanding, the acclaimed Toronto-based author of the short story “Cinema Rex” – which won the 2013 McClelland & Stewart/Writers’ Trust Journey Prize – and 2017’s well-received non-fiction work, Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race, is poised to publish his own entry in the crowded genre. In March, Ruthnum will debut Find You in the Dark, a thriller written under the pseudonym Nathan Ripley.

  The novel tells the story of Martin Reese, a husband and father who made his fortune in the tech world and has now more or less retired. He uses his time to dig up the bodies of murdered women the police have been unable to locate despite, in many instances, having the killers in custody. When he digs up what he thinks is the body of his murdered sister-in-law, he discovers that there may be an active serial killer still at work – a discovery that brings him to the attention of a dogged detective and the killer himself, known as the Ragman.

  Find You in the Dark will be published simultaneously by Simon & Schuster Canada and Atria in the U.S. The two-book deal netted the author a cool six-figure advance, sub rights sales in the U.K. and New Zealand, and a TV option from eOne.

  The book’s pre-publication success may have occurred not in spite of Ruthnum’s suspicions regarding the genre, but because of them. “There’s this general thought, even with people who don’t read thrillers or genre fiction, that those kinds of books are by the rules, just plug a character with a weird quirk into something we’ve seen a hundred times before.” And Ruthnum is quick to acknowledge that in many cases, this may indeed be true.

  It is precisely because Ruthnum is aware of the potential pitfalls of stereotype and cliché that he remains conscious of the need to subvert genre expectations wherever possible. “If you’re writing a character you think you’ve seen before, you have to put pressure on it,” he says. “Why is this interesting? Why am I talking about it?”

  For a writer working in a genre that carries with it such clear expectations, finding the right mix of the familiar and the subversive is key. “I think Find You in the Dark dances around a lot of tropes,” Ruthnum says. “There’s the obsessive cop who wants justice, there’s also the obsessive man who’s trying to atone for something in his past. I think I put pressure on both these by, for example, making my protagonist quite a bit creepier than he thinks he is.”

  Another staple Ruthnum works to subvert is the genre’s cavalier treatment of women as victims. There are no graphic descriptions of the murders in the novel, a restraint Ruthnum claims is in part a result of his exposure to a true-crime book – the title long forgotten –from the 1990s. “The detailed descriptions of the women’s corpses in various stages of decomposition read so strangely. It was almost like you were reading erotic fiction, except it was about dead bodies.”

  While Find You in the Dark has dead bodies aplenty, it is a psychological novel that employs characteristics more self-consciously literary than standard genre fare. Working within the constraints of the form, Ruthnum says, had the added bonus of improving his literary technique. “It was a really good, late-life learning process to train myself out of some bad habits.”

  By Steven W. Beattie

  Issue Date: January 2018

  Tagged with: Find You in the Dark, Naben Ruthnum, Nathan Ripley, thrillers

• Medium
  https://medium.com/@zachary_houle/a-review-of-nathan-ripleys-find-you-in-the-dark-86f6e684c6f9
  Word count: 1199

  A Review of Nathan Ripley’s “Find You in the Dark”
  Gross-Out Territory
  “Find You in the Dark” Book Cover

  Wanna read a sick and twisted book about a sort-of psychopath? Nathan Ripley’s (not his real name; it’s a pseudonym for Journey Prize-winning author Naban Ruthnum) Find You in the Dark might be just the ticket. Combining a serial killer drama with a police procedural, the book is about a guy named Martin Reese who has the fun hobby of finding dead bodies from serial killer victims that the cops haven’t located. Nice, huh? While he’s also a loving, doting family man, he’s married to the sister of a woman who went missing 20 years ago and was the victim of a killer. Great, eh? Naturally, a female police detective has started zeroing in on Reese, but complications abound because someone else is pretty pissed off at Reese’s undercover work — a more recently killed body turns up among dead ones in a location Reese believes is the resting place (note that I didn’t say final) that his wife’s sister is in.

  So how does Reese find these victims? He’s latched onto a corrupt police officer who sends him information on police records for a slight fee. And that’s where the book really goes off into incredulous territory. While it is plausible that there might be a crooked cop out there willing to sell certain information, I doubt that any cop in his or her right mind would continue to do so after finding out, as this cop does, what the information is being used for — simply for fear of losing his main source of income or worse. This is especially true because Reese taunts the police by leaving computerized voice messages chiding them for not following through on these cold cases.

  So you really have to suspend your disbelief quite a bit through this twisted and turny book, that’s probably best described as pulp fiction — since it’s written in a really gritty style. While most of the violence takes place off the printed page, Ripley (or Ruthnum) spares no graphic detail on the state of the corpses that Reese finds. That means that this is a gross out of a book, one that can be hard to read at times for the stomach churning details and the fact that the main protagonist is basically one sick little puppy.

  In fact, though, most of the characters in this book are of the “unlikable” sort. Even the policewoman working the case has a bit of a mean, sadomasochistic edge to her. Since the novel is told from rapidly shifting viewpoints from chapter to chapter, it’s hard to really root for any of these characters. I wonder if the book might have been better told from the policewoman’s point of view. At the very least, there would be a moral centre to this novel. Still, I did enjoy Find You in the Dark in a very perverse sort of way. This is a book about keeping secrets — Reese hasn’t told anyone else of his penchant for hunting dead bodies, and there’s an all-too-obvious hint of a possible affair between Reese’s wife and one of his former co-workers. On that level, Find You in the Dark is about the personal skeletons hiding in everyone’s closet.

  Just don’t make the mistake of calling this literary fiction. Even though Ruthnum has won a prestigious Canadian literary award, this is the sort of thing they make television serials out of. It turns out that the television rights have been picked up for this work, so you can probably expect to hear more about it when it comes out. I’m not sure how long of a TV series this would make, since the book closes with a note of some finality. However, if the producers can find ways of milking the storyline beyond a season, assuming this gets enough viewers (fans of Dexter and Criminal Minds, probably) for them to do so, there might be more here than meets the eye.

  As noted earlier, though, the book does stretch the boundaries of credibility. While I know there were a couple of high-profile serial killers working the Pacific Northwest (the book is set in Seattle and environs), Find You in the Dark makes it sound like the area is crawling with perhaps a good dozen or so of the perps, which seems ludicrous. But, to make the story work, Reese needs to exhume a lot of bodies close to his home in order to not raise too much in the way of suspicions from his wife and teenaged daughter. Maybe the book might have worked better if he was a bit of a lone wolf, but then we wouldn’t see much of a human side to him — which this book wants us to see. To that end, the author wants to make the book perhaps a tad hair above the obvious pulpy concoction this really is. (Still, it makes you kind of wonder why he bothered with a pen name, when the information on who he really is is readily available.)

  Overall, Find You in the Dark is a fun, yet disturbing, work. It really works its best when it dabbles in the police procedural side of things, as the main detectives working the case make their deductions and come closer and closer to solving the crime, albeit with plausible false leads. Otherwise, it’s kind of wickedly gross and evokes our sympathies for a character who may be one step away from actually making a kill of his own. In fact, Reese is so thorough about not leaving a trace at his crime scenes that one wonders if it wouldn’t have been easier for him to choose his own victim to kill. It’s stuff to ponder about a book that really goes over-the-top at times, loading up things that just don’t seem all that plausible in reality. I guess this is what some people read fiction for. If you like crime drama, you’re probably going to go ga-ga over Find You in the Dark as it lets you live a secret double life of one drawn into the motivations of serial killers. If you find it stomach churning, well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

  Nathan Ripley’s Find You in the Dark was published by Simon & Schuster Canada on March 6, 2018.

  Of course, if you like what you see, please recommend this piece (click on the clapping hands icon below) and share it with your followers.

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  Zachary Houle

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• The Globe and Mail
  https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/book-reviews/review-nathan-ripleys-cracking-good-debut-thriller-find-you-in-the-dark/article38318925/
  Word count: 1112

  

  Find You in the Dark, which is about a retired tech mogul who spends his spare time investigating serial killers, is written by Naben Ruthnum, under the pen name Nathan Ripley.

  IAN PATTERSON
  NAVNEET ALANG
  Special to The Globe and Mail
  Published March 22, 2018
  Updated March 22, 2018

  Title
  Find You in the Dark
  Author
  Nathan Ripley
  Genre
  Fiction
  Publisher
  Simon & Schuster
  Pages
  368
  Price
  $24.99

  If there is a leitmotif that runs through the crime thriller, it is grime. Plunging into the depths of human evil, the griminess of the genre and its often damaged characters reminds us that grit and violence are part and parcel of human life, even though we might wish that weren't the case.

  So it is with Find You in the Dark, the first thriller by author Nathan Ripley. Dirt is always a problem – a thing to be disturbed in just the right way, gotten rid of, or somehow escaped. Where the novel differs from others is that the grime that pervades the text is always counterbalanced by a sterile cleanliness – and at each point that the dirt is cleared away, what is revealed underneath is somehow more disturbing than what came before.

  The book centres on tech mogul Martin Reese, who retired early and rich and now spends his spare time sifting through arcane clues as to the final whereabouts of young women murdered by serial killers. He then anonymously relays the location to police, claiming to be giving peace to still-grieving families, all the while admonishing the cops for their dereliction of duty.

  It is at the outset an invocation of a mind not quite as clean as Martin's ostensible intentions, and as the novel unfolds it becomes clear that the protagonist is far from a mere good Samaritan. Few details drive this home as clearly as the fact that Reese is married to Ellen, whose own sister was taken by a serial killer 20 years prior to the events of the novel.

  The inevitable complication is that in one of Reese's meticulous digs – each treated with an almost disturbing methodical precision – where only one 20-year-old corpse should have been, there is also a fresh one. Someone else calls in the find to police and claims it is time to stop merely finding bodies, and instead making them.

  Teasing out both who is behind the new killings and the attempt to frame Reese drives the plot – and Ripley does an effective job of deploying Reese as an unreliable narrator. As a reader, one's loyalty will be tested – and possibly pushed over the edge. Reese is always on the brink of revealing himself as either a better or worse version of himself, and though the text jumps perspective between characters, one never quite gets a clear, moral evaluation of Reese – that task left up to the reader, with an effectively morally ambiguous ending.

  Find You in the Dark is a fast-paced book that one can blow through in a weekend, but it isn't exactly a beach read. It is more akin to dark British crime TV dramas such as Broadchurch or Luther, satisfyingly sinister and unsettling in their explorations of the violent possibilities of humanity, better suited to a dull, rainy Sunday than to sand and surf. The book does have it downsides, though, particularly the dialogue, which especially in the first half of the book can feel amateurish and clunky. The ending arrives suddenly, too, and perhaps a touch too neatly – yet it remains satisfying despite that.

  Beyond its status as entertainment, however, it is difficult not to notice the allegory at work in the novel: Here is a Silicon Valley tech mogul convinced he is doing the right thing until it is revealed just how damaging his good intentions have been. The book is filled with dirt of a more digital kind, too: Characters are tracked using technology, and it's a timely reminder of how tech has shifted from gleaming jewel to troubled contemporary mess, and of how privacy has changed in just a short couple of decades.

  Of course, if a reckoning with social media desperately needs literary treatment, the other hot-button issue is identity, and here Find You in the Dark provides one more wrinkle: Nathan Ripley is in fact Toronto writer Naben Ruthnum. The pen name is of particular significance since Ruthnum's previous book was Curry, an exploration of so-called "currybooks" – immigrant fiction or narratives about cuisine that are unfairly grouped under identity, according to Ruthnum, and do readers and writers a disservice by unifying that which is actually quite disparate and diverse.

  The pen name is thus an attempt to escape the inevitable baggage that comes with being a minority writer – something that my mere mention of the fact undercuts.

  It is a fraught issue, however. When one is a minority in an English-speaking country, an occasional thing you run into is someone who insists on pronouncing your name in an anglicized way, so that Sandhu becomes Sandoo, or Ruthnum becomes Ripley. I used to find this grating: Why should these people have to contort themselves and their monikers to the majority? Why not just ask people to learn how to pronounce the name properly, or do away with their prejudice?

  But it's difficult to hold such a hard line when the dirt of prejudice and unfair categorization still sits like a layer over the literary world. It's not that the need to change a name is any less frustrating. It's just that it becomes more understandable, after the exhaustion of fighting bias for decades of one's life sets in. Sometimes you don't want to make the name the thing – you just want to get on with life: raise your kids, get a job, or in the case of one Nathan Ripley, write a cracking good crime thriller with a few interesting resonances, and have it be seen as that and only that. On that front, Find You in the Dark succeeds admirably.

  Navneet Alang is a technology and culture journalist based in Toronto.
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• The Globe and Mail
  https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/book-reviews/review-naben-ruthnums-curry-explores-issues-of-identity-in-food-and-fiction/article36143189/
  Word count: 1205

  Review: Naben Ruthnum's Curry explores issues of identity in food and fiction
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  In his book, Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race, Naben Ruthnum explores how South Asian culture is presented in the West.
  MANISHA AGGARWAL-SCHIFELLITE
  Special to The Globe and Mail
  Published September 1, 2017
  Updated September 1, 2017

  Title
  Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race
  Author
  Naben Ruthnum
  Genre
  Non-fiction
  Publisher
  Coach House Books
  Pages
  117
  Price
  $14.95

  If you're someone who has ever had their identity questioned, either with an innocuous "Are you sure you aren't [fill in the blank ethnicity]?" or a more aggressive "No, where are you really from?" you know how exhausting it is to answer such queries. In his first book, Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race, Toronto-based writer Naben Ruthnum revels in questions, using them to guide his exploration of "immigrant stories" or, as he calls them with only a bit of derision, "currybooks." Why, he asks, does this genre persist as the primary example of books written by South Asian people who live outside the subcontinent?

  In Curry, Ruthnum argues that constantly using identity as a unifying force in "immigrant fiction" and food writing is detrimental to both audiences and writers. "I don't want to self-define as part of a brown identity that is still shaped by outside perception, by the imagination that the majority imposes upon us," he writes. Just like calling a meal "curry," he says, the category of the "South Asian writer" is too simplistic to be accurate or representative of the thing that it really is. And just like curry, South Asian writers are diverse in themselves, representing countless histories, identities and points of view.

  Curry is divided into three sections: Eating, Reading and Race. In his first section, Ruthnum lays out his issues with the way South Asian-ness is presented in food writing and cookbooks, setting up later critiques of diasporic writing in general. Here is where he points out that the history of curry the food is as varied and diverse as the people who are associated with it; tikka masala, pulao rice and even chilis are not all part of the same ancient recipe. To assume that curry is a dish invented in India and exported with no modifications erases the histories of those who have cooked and eaten it over centuries of colonialism, war and immigration. It's a cycle that further stereotypes the diaspora and those who live in it, Ruthnum argues. "When genres and forms have been around for long enough," he writes, "there comes a point when they risk calcifying: becoming the same stories." This calcification is found in a never-ending parade of clichéd pieces on a similar theme: Cook your mother's curry right and you will either find connection to your ancestors or realize that you can't connect any more. Either way, the symbolism is clear and, according to Ruthnum, in need of an update.

  In the more literary currybooks discussed in the second section, Ruthnum laments that the internal battle over identity always plays out the same way: The protagonist's home country, frozen in nostalgic and authentic amber, offers a respite from feelings of displacement. But for second-generation people living in Canada, Ruthnum says, things are more complicated. He returns often to the very particular "weirdness" of being a racialized person in a diaspora, recognized as a tourist in your parents' home country, yet rarely accepted with no questions in the country of your birth. He knows his family's history in the "East" (Mauritius) informs his sense of self and his writing, but he resents the idea that this history must define him going forward. This internal push-and-pull is a classic currybook set-up, but in writing Curry, Ruthnum wants to change the ending to the story.

  As the narrator of the reader's journey through a recent history of "immigrant fiction," white-people-with-wanderlust travelogues and wistful memoirs of spicy home cooking, Ruthnum marries his sarcastic wit with fascinating history and prescient observations about pop-culture representations of Indian-ness. He may think I'm focusing too much on identity, but for me, Curry is most powerful when Ruthnum places his own writing and reading decisions and desires into his analysis. His humour comes through perfectly in Eating, where he criticizes the overreliance of South Asian food writing on domesticity, authenticity and nostalgia while simultaneously recounting his own experiences learning to cook Mauritian food – careful to explain that he did it out of "self-sufficiency," not some misguided attempt to understand his culture. The coda is the most satisfying part of the book, in which Ruthnum writes about his experience publishing his first successful story, Cinema Rex, set in Mauritius. The anxieties that follow that success reveal Ruthnum's fears that he has capitulated to the clichés of the currybook genre, even as he fights to distance himself from it. It's a complex and introspective account of his own place in the quagmire of modern literature and it speaks volumes to the emotional work that creators who are not white men have to do before they even sit down at the computer.

  For all of the questions Ruthnum asks, there are many that he wishes he didn't have to engage with. But the ability to simply exist in the world is a luxury and, in the West, it is a luxury largely given to white men. Given this, Ruthnum's convincing arguments about self-definition would have been much stronger with more discussion of the politics that make this so difficult for marginalized people. The excellent coda about the anxieties and revelations of publishing Cinema Rex would have been even greater had he included, in his discussion about the use of pseudonyms in literature, a mention of why women and people of colour have used pen names for hundreds of years and continue to alter their names for publication today (not just for reasons of vanity or experimentation). We may not want the racist history and current realities of Canadian life to affect our decisions as brown writers, but we can't pretend to be immune to them.

  Ruthnum's book is an engaging and entertaining examination of fiction and his voice is a welcome addition to the discussion. He doesn't boast to have all the answers, but he has a few solutions. "As brown people in the West, our stories don't have to explain ourselves to white people or to each other," Ruthnum writes toward the end of Curry. It's an effective and necessary way to propel the conversation forward: a rallying call for those who are usually the ones bombarded with questions, and giving them the space to ask their own.

  Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite is a writer and editor whose work has been published by Hazlitt and Lucky Peach.
  Funding for school libraries in Canada is woefully inadequate and children at high-needs elementary schools are paying the price. Read Between the Lines, a documentary produced by the Indigo Love of Reading Foundation, captures the importance of early literacy and the challenges we face in Canada by underfunding school libraries.

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