Aruni Kashyap's Newest Collection of Short Stories: The Way You Want to Be Loved

Creative Writing Professor Aruni Kashyap's newest collection of short stories was published on October 1, 2024 by Gaudy Boy. The Way You Want to Be Loved is, "a book of ferocious inquiry and vast heart," according to Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning.

about the book

At a New Delhi conference, an Assamese writer is interrogated on why he writes about magical folktales instead of the insurgencies. A mother splashes around in the village lake to mask the lovemaking sounds of her son with another man. A newly-arrived graduate student in Minnesota navigates living arrangements with his white roommate, Mike, and Mike’s Indian girlfriend.

In agile and frank prose, The Way You Want to Be Loved tells the stories of queer, displaced lives from India’s Northeast, an underrepresented region in English fiction. A hybrid cast of characters represents the common people in these thirteen stories, whether western-trained academic or village sorcerer, army soldier or local politician, homeward-bound son or dutiful daughter-in-law. They wrestle with diasporic melancholia, the social pressures of familial duty, and the search for their own personhood, even as they live in a world where personhood is continually compromised and reshaped under oppressive forces larger than themselves. Aruni Kashyap offers up a powerful critique of the malfunctioning democracies of India and the US, deftly balancing devastation and tragedy with a darkly humorous tone that has readers questioning their laughter.

At its core, The Way You Want to Be Loved explores what it means to love, desire, and long for life under the duress of everyday and state-sanctioned violence and discrimination.

"These powerful stories shorten the distance between South Asia and America, which are, refreshingly, not positioned as opposite pulls but as companion landscapes where dream, desire, and defiance thrive. With a cast of characters who are emotionally intelligent yet still flawed, imperfect, yet still endearing, Aruni Kashyap eschews the predictable narratives and brings us unique takes on leaving home, loving family, and longing for passion. Daring and surprising, The Way You Want to Be Loved is the must-read of our times."

–Rigoberto González, author of To the Boy Who Was Night

Read a Review: Touching Tales Highlight Neglected Northeast 

about the author

Aruni Kashyap is the author of His Father’s Disease: Stories and the novel The House With a Thousand Stories. Along with editing a collection of stories called How to Tell the Story of an Insurgency, he translated two novels from Assamese to English, published by Zubaan Books and Penguin Random House. Recipient of a Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Faculty Research Grants in the Humanities and Arts Program, the Arts Lab Faculty Fellowship, and the Charles Wallace India Trust Scholarship for Creative Writing to the University of Edinburgh, his poetry collection, There is No Good Time for Bad News, was nominated for the 58th Georgia Author of the Year Awards 2022, a finalist for the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize, and the Four Way Books Levis Award in Poetry. His translations have been nominated for the Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation 2023 and VOW Book Awards 2024. His short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Catapult, Bitch Media, The Boston Review, Electric Literature, The Oxford Anthology of Writings from Northeast, The Kenyon Review, The New York Times, The Guardian UK, and others. He also writes in Assamese and is the author of a novel called Noikhon Etia Duroit and three novellas. He is an Associate Professor of English & Creative Writing and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Georgia, Athens.