Kanishk Tharoor

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian and NPR “A writer who is gifted not just with extraordinary talent but also with a subtle, original, and probing mind.” —Amitav Ghosh In one of the singularly imaginative stories from Kanishk Tharoor’s Swimmer Among the Stars, despondent diplomats entertain themselves by playing table tennis in zero gravity—for after rising seas destroy Manhattan, the United Nations moves to an orbiting space hotel. In other tales, a team of anthropologists treks to a remote village to record a language’s last surviving speaker intoning her native tongue; an elephant and his driver cross the ocean to meet the whims of a Moroccan princess; and Genghis Khan’s marauding army steadily approaches an unnamed city’s walls. With exuberant originality and startling vision, Tharoor cuts against the grain of literary convention, drawing equally from ancient history and current events. His world-spanning stories speak to contemporary challenges of environmental collapse and cultural appropriation, but also to the workings of legend and their timeless human truths. Whether refashioning the romances of Alexander the Great or confronting the plight of today’s refugees, Tharoor writes with distinctive insight and remarkable assurance. Swimmer Among the Stars announces the arrival of a vital, enchanting talent.

Stories

Swimmer Among the Stars

Macy HB

Humans always lose more history than they ever possess. 

But every so often, the gnarled tea drinkers looked at the young, the smooth-faced looked at the old, and all wondered if somehow the world was passing them by.

Amid this folding of day into night, the laughter of the teahouse came as a whisper of that impossible life without creases.

In later years, they will say that her term "swimmer among the stars" means “astronaut." They will never say that "astronaut" means the “swimmer among the stars.”

Perhaps this sad-eyed creature merely looked at the pond and thought: What a miserable excuse for a sea.

There was an enviable modesty to the even spread of low buildings, the humble bakery warming its ovens at the edge of the square, the grace of the mosque's silhouetted minaret, the peace of all its obscurity.

The calligraphers fell in love with each other's penwork, staying up all night to trace words in the sand and sentences in silk. They went to sleep dreaming in alien lines.

Drunk under the aurora one night, the communications officer and the first mate go out onto the frozen deck and dance like lovers from another country.

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