I Am An Executioner: Love Stories

(Paperback)

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Description

A Bengal tiger wakes up one morning realising he is ravenously in love. A pompous railway supervisor in a remote Indian province bites off more than he can chew when a peculiar new clerk arrives on his doorstep. In another place and in another time, a secret agent who spends her days watching the front door of an unknown quarry discovers something she isn't meant to. An immigrant housewife in a Midwestern town geeing up for Thanksgiving makes a wish she may come to regret. And a small and famous country's only executioner claims his conscience is as clean as his heavy, washed stones. With this glittering, savage and elegant first collection, where reality loops in Borgesian twists and dazzles with Bollywood exuberance, where frayed photographs take on a life of their own and where elephants wish only to die with dignity, Rajesh Parameswaran bursts onto the literary landscape as an astonishing new talent.

Reviews

The word "dazzling" is more often used than deserved in criticism but this is truly a dazzling, not to mention riotously funny and savagely memorable book * Irish Times *
Original, surprising and visceral * Psychologies *
Stories that are savagely funny, stories that haunt and sear and stun, stories so original they defy categorization above all, stories generously laden with sheer reading pleasure: I Am an Executioner is a brilliant and spellbinding collection * Manil Suri *
A compulsive and infectious narrative * International Herald Tribune *
I Am an Executioner gets the pulse racing from word one. I love Rajesh because his last name is even more impossible than my own, and because he has redefined the American short story for me. Bravo! -- Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story
In this debut collection, original, quirky and written with panache, Raj Parameswaran explores troubled lives - both human and animal - with compassion and humour. Readers will remember these unusual stories for a long time. -- Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, author of Palace of Illusions
Wonderful stories - like small, deft carnivals entering our desert cities and cranky towns to, for a while, muster us into feeling, resolution, and happiness, before they go on their way. We can't help but be grateful for them. -- Charlie Smith, author of Word Comix: Poems

Author Bio

Rajesh Parameswaran is a graduate of Yale Law School and a former law clerk to a federal judge. His short stories have appeared in McSweeney's, Zoetrope: All-Story, Fiction and Book Magazine. The Strange Career of Doctor Raju Gopalarajan' won a National Magazine Award and was nominated for the Kay Cattarulla Award for Best Short Story. Rajesh Parameswaran lives in New York.