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The Way You Want to Be Loved: Short Stories
“Kashyap’s stories are a powerful and important contribution to world literature.”— The Rumpus
A collection of poignant, finely crafted stories set against the backdrop of violence that has long racked north-eastern India.”— Amitav Ghosh
“Daring and surprising, the must-read of our times.” — Rigoberto González
“A book of ferocious inquiry and vast heart, delightful formal play and intellectual agility, The Way You Want to Be Loved asks how we can bear to live with the distances that make and unmake us”— Megha Majumdar, NYT bestselling author of A Burning
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.
“This masterful collection mixes Chekovian realism with Borgesian magic to create a new and vital literary voice for our times. ”— Nathan Oates, author of A Flaw in the Design
“A new voice in the burgeoning oeuvre of anglophone fiction from northeast India."— World Literature Today
“...prose is restrained, expressive, and unflinching, capable of capturing the delicate nuances of human emotion and the brutality of injustice.”— Shelf Awareness
A collection of poignant, finely crafted stories set against the backdrop of violence that has long racked north-eastern India.”— Amitav Ghosh
“Daring and surprising, the must-read of our times.” — Rigoberto González
“A book of ferocious inquiry and vast heart, delightful formal play and intellectual agility, The Way You Want to Be Loved asks how we can bear to live with the distances that make and unmake us”— Megha Majumdar, NYT bestselling author of A Burning
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.
“This masterful collection mixes Chekovian realism with Borgesian magic to create a new and vital literary voice for our times. ”— Nathan Oates, author of A Flaw in the Design
“A new voice in the burgeoning oeuvre of anglophone fiction from northeast India."— World Literature Today
“...prose is restrained, expressive, and unflinching, capable of capturing the delicate nuances of human emotion and the brutality of injustice.”— Shelf Awareness
- GenresShort StoriesIndia
256 pages, Paperback
Published October 1, 2024
3 people are currently reading
2578 people want to read
About the author
Aruni Kashyap
15 books58 followersAruni Kashyap is the author of The Way You Want To Be Loved, The House With a Thousand Stories, and the forthcoming How to Date a Fanatic. Along with editing a collection of stories called How to Tell the Story of an Insurgency, he is the translator of four novels from Assamese to English. A 2024 Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fellow at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, he is also the recipient of a 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, which have been shortlisted for the 2023 and 2024 Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation and VOW Book Awards 2024, include The Bronze Sword of Tengphakhri Tehsildar by Indira Goswami (Zubaan), My Poems Are Not for Your Ad Campaign by Anuradha Sarma Pujari (Penguin), An Illuminated Valley by Dipak Kumar Barkakaty (Penguin), and Ten Love Stories and a Story of Despair (Westland). He has served as a visiting writer at Lander University, Minnesota State University, Converse University, The College of William & Mary, Valdosta State University, Dibrugarh University, Assam Don Bosco University, and delivered the Tagore Lecture in Modern Indian Literature at Cornell University. His short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Granta, The Boston Review, Electric Literature, Catapult, Bitch Media, The Kenyon Review, The LitHub, The Oxford Anthology of Writings from the Northeast, The New York Times, The Guardian UK, and others. He also writes in Assamese and is the author of a novel, 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.
His translations, which have been shortlisted for the 2023 and 2024 Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation and VOW Book Awards 2024, include The Bronze Sword of Tengphakhri Tehsildar by Indira Goswami (Zubaan), My Poems Are Not for Your Ad Campaign by Anuradha Sarma Pujari (Penguin), An Illuminated Valley by Dipak Kumar Barkakaty (Penguin), and Ten Love Stories and a Story of Despair (Westland). He has served as a visiting writer at Lander University, Minnesota State University, Converse University, The College of William & Mary, Valdosta State University, Dibrugarh University, Assam Don Bosco University, and delivered the Tagore Lecture in Modern Indian Literature at Cornell University. His short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Granta, The Boston Review, Electric Literature, Catapult, Bitch Media, The Kenyon Review, The LitHub, The Oxford Anthology of Writings from the Northeast, The New York Times, The Guardian UK, and others. He also writes in Assamese and is the author of a novel, 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.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 25, 2025
I really wish Goodreads had half stars because this collection is a solid 3.5 and neither 3 or 4 stars feels right.
The stories were consistent in their pacing and language, and majority of them explored traditional themes in fresh and fascinating by ways, but I wasn’t particularly impressed by the prose. There were definitely high points—points in which I felt taken by the language—but for the most part, it was alright. I also think some of the dialogue read awkwardly, but I’d wager that writing white, mid-western Americans could be a bit awkward for an Assamese writer.
Overall, it was a solid collection of stories.
The stories were consistent in their pacing and language, and majority of them explored traditional themes in fresh and fascinating by ways, but I wasn’t particularly impressed by the prose. There were definitely high points—points in which I felt taken by the language—but for the most part, it was alright. I also think some of the dialogue read awkwardly, but I’d wager that writing white, mid-western Americans could be a bit awkward for an Assamese writer.
Overall, it was a solid collection of stories.
April 26, 2025
found this on hoopla through my library and so glad i did. a beautiful set of short stories set in Assam (or diaspora - in India and the US). I appreciated the honest reflection of how the military, police, and even community members claiming to have your best interests at heart all work to erode freedom and safety. also, the queerness!!!
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews