ALL THE NAMES THEY
USED FOR GOD

Stories by Anjali Sachdeva
Spiegel & Grau, 2018

purchase

Description

A dystopian tale about genetically modified septuplets who are struck by a mysterious illness; a love story about a man bewitched by a mermaid; a stirring imagining of the lives of Nigerian schoolgirls in the aftermath of a Boko Haram kidnapping. The stories in All the Names They Used for God break down genre barriers—from science fiction to American Gothic to magical realism to horror—and are united by each character’s brutal struggle with fate. Like many of us, the characters in this collection are in pursuit of the sublime. Along the way, they must navigate the borderland between salvation and destruction.

About The Author

Anjali Sachdeva’s fiction has appeared in The Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, The Yale Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Literary Review, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has taught writing at the University of Iowa, Augustana College, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Pittsburgh. She also worked for six years at the Creative Nonfiction Foundation, where she was director of educational programs. She has hiked through the backcountry of Canada, Iceland, Kenya, Mexico, and the United States, and spent much of her childhood reading fantasy novels and waiting to be whisked away to an alternate universe. Instead, she lives in Pittsburgh, which is pretty wonderful as far as places in this universe go. This is her first book.

Reviews

“What an outstanding short story collection. I knew nothing about this book going in and was thrilled by each story. There is so much range here, and there is a nice fabulist edge to nearly all the stories. The writer wields so much confidence and control in her prose and, my goodness, what imagination, what passion there is in this work. From one story to the next I felt like the writer knows everything about everything.”—Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist and Hunger

“Fuses science, myth, and imagination into a dark and gorgeous series of questions about our current predicaments.”—Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See

“Delightfully unexpected . . . The strange and wonderful stories that make up [Anjali] Sachdeva’s debut begin on this side of reality and slip to the other—often so gracefully, and with such a precise rendering of the fantastical, that we become inadvertent believers. ‘The World by Night’ plunges us into a cave beneath a prairie, where Sadie, an abandoned albino bride, finds herself seduced by a dark and glittering world populated by elusive creatures like herself. ‘Glass-Lung’ begins with a furnace accident in a Pennsylvania steel mill; its only survivor clings to life with the help of his eight-year-old daughter, who, in the kind of surprising shift typical of these stories, ends up working in a museum as the secretary to an archaeologist, then serving as the archaeologist’s assistant on a search for an Egyptian tomb. . . . The brilliance of these stories—beyond the cool, precise artistry of their prose—is their embrace of both the known and the unknown, in a combination that feels truly original.”—The New York Times Book Review