Nearly all the characters in these short stories are trying to reconcile their true desires with the forces of displacement and deprivation at work in Nepali society. Against the backdrop of violent Maoist insurgencies, they struggle with domestic crises: obligations to aging parents, the tyranny of the caste system and arranged marriages, and outdated notions of gender and sexuality. By setting the stories in Kathmandu during a time of political upheaval and cultural transformation, Mr. Upadhyay is able to study the effects that this richly storied city has on individual consciousness.
Samrat Upadhyay is the first Nepali-born fiction writer to be published in the United States. His debut story collection, Arresting God in Kathmandu, won a Whiting Writers’ Award, and his second, The Royal Ghosts, won the Asian American Literary Award. He is also the author of three novels, The Guru of Love, Buddha’s Orphans, and The City Son, as well as a third story collection, Mad Country. His newest novel, Darkmotherland, will be published by Soho Press in January 2025. He teaches creative writing at Indiana University.
Because we happened to overhear a conversation between writers we admire, in which they compared Samrat Upadyhay’s stories to those of Anton Chekhov and William Trevor. Also—and we’re a little ashamed to admit this—we might have a slightly unhealthy obsession with the Nepali royal massacre.
“You cannot forever dwell in the beauty of the sentence,” says Samrat Upadhyay on the Living Writers podcast. Listen to the whole three-question interview here.