we,
of the forsaken world... came to me in
2011, when I was on a bus between Dubrovnik and Zagreb. A tall, brunette woman with a lingering stare sat down
next to me on one of the stops. We began to talk about a host of things I can’t
remember now, but the one thing that she told me which did remain in my head
was the following: Croatia is one of the poorest countries in the world. Something about that sentence inspired my imagination.
After we reached the bus station, I had to sit on one of the metal benches for
a few hours, and write. I was starting to imagine different countries,
completely imagined in my head. One was a half-rich half poor megalopolis, the
sort found in most third-world countries. Then, there was a town that wasn’t so
different looking from my grandmother’s place, the southern Indian city of Mysore. There was a tribe in the middle of nowhere, not to
mention a town of great touristic importance, destroyed by an industrial spill.
I also imagined hundreds of voices. Though, over the course of time, those two
hundred-so voices became around sixteen; the most distinct and boisterous of
the lot.
The
tale of how I got published is equally as much of a complicated one. I had
finished the book in 2016. One of my friends, who was an editor at a small
press in New York, gave me a list of agents to contact. Most of them
responsed stealthily and quickly, but after some months, they did not find my
book – experimental, ambitious, overtly literary – to be a quick fit for the
market. They had to turn it down. After about a year of waiting for these
agents to respond, I started submitting to small presses. It was in 2019 that I
got a response from an editor at Iguana Books. They were interested in publishing
the book. I told them that I was still waiting for some other publishers to
respond, so I asked them to wait for some weeks so that I could get some
responses. Within two weeks, this same editor emailed me, asking me to follow
up. He really liked this book, and wanted to publish it.
Before my work with Iguana Books, I hadn’t had a publisher
respond to me so positively. Admittedly, Iguana Books is a hybrid press. This
means that they vet every book project that they take on, but they ask the
author to take on the financial burdens of publication. This still did not mean
that they had to care so much about my writing. They did a lot of work, from
the editorial stages, to the design of the cover, and the maps that I asked to
have tailored onto the book itself, to make sure that the book was
aesthetically enriched. They spent a lot of time with me talking on the phone,
making sure all of my needs were met, from last-minute changes to a sentence or
two, to having my books flown to Hong
Kong or Delhi for the sake of book festivals. I do not think having been
published by a hybrid press has downgraded the quality of my work in any way;
if anything, I am glad to have had people who believe as fondly in my vision as
I do. It makes me look forward to later publications, as well as the future of my
career.
About the Author
Kiran Bhat was born in Jonesboro, Georgia to parents from villages in
Dakshina Kannada, India. An avid world traveler, polyglot, and digital
nomad, he has currently traveled to more than 130 countries, lived in 18
different places, and speaks 12 languages. He currently lives in
Melbourne, Australia.
About the Book
The Internet has connected – and continues to connect – billions of people around the world, sometimes in surprising ways. In his sprawling new novel, we of the forsaken world, author Kiran Bhat has turned the fact of that once-unimaginable connectivity into a metaphor for life itself.
In, we of the forsaken world, Bhat follows the fortunes of 16 people who live in four distinct places on the planet. The gripping stories include those of a man’s journey to the birthplace of his mother, a tourist town destroyed by an industrial spill; a chief’s second son born in a nameless remote tribe, creating a scramble for succession as their jungles are destroyed by loggers; a homeless, one-armed woman living in a sprawling metropolis who sets out to take revenge on the men who trafficked her; and a milkmaid in a small village of shanty shacks connected only by a mud and concrete road who watches the girls she calls friends destroy her reputation.
Like modern communication networks, the stories in , we of the forsaken world connect along subtle lines, dispersing at the moments where another story is about to take place. Each story is a parable unto itself, but the tales also expand to engulf the lives of everyone who lives on planet Earth, at every second, everywhere.
As Bhat notes, his characters “largely live their own lives, deal with their own problems, and exist independently of the fact that they inhabit the same space. This becomes a parable of globalization, but in a literary text.”
Bhat continues: “I wanted to imagine a globalism, but one that was bottom-to-top, and using globalism to imagine new terrains, for the sake of fiction, for the sake of humanity’s intellectual growth.”
“These are stories that could be directly ripped from our headlines. I think each of these stories is very much its own vignette, and each of these vignettes gives a lot of insight into human nature, as a whole.”
we of the forsaken world takes pride of place next to such notable literary works as David Mitchell’s CLOUD ATLAS, a finalist for the prestigious Man Booker Prize for 2004, and Mohsin Hamid’s EXIT WEST, which was listed by the New York Times as one of its Best Books of 2017.
Bhat’s epic also stands comfortably with the works of contemporary visionaries such as Umberto Eco, Haruki Murakami, and Philip K. Dick.
About the Author
Website → http://iguanabooks.ca/
About the Book
The Internet has connected – and continues to connect – billions of people around the world, sometimes in surprising ways. In his sprawling new novel, we of the forsaken world, author Kiran Bhat has turned the fact of that once-unimaginable connectivity into a metaphor for life itself.
In, we of the forsaken world, Bhat follows the fortunes of 16 people who live in four distinct places on the planet. The gripping stories include those of a man’s journey to the birthplace of his mother, a tourist town destroyed by an industrial spill; a chief’s second son born in a nameless remote tribe, creating a scramble for succession as their jungles are destroyed by loggers; a homeless, one-armed woman living in a sprawling metropolis who sets out to take revenge on the men who trafficked her; and a milkmaid in a small village of shanty shacks connected only by a mud and concrete road who watches the girls she calls friends destroy her reputation.
Like modern communication networks, the stories in , we of the forsaken world connect along subtle lines, dispersing at the moments where another story is about to take place. Each story is a parable unto itself, but the tales also expand to engulf the lives of everyone who lives on planet Earth, at every second, everywhere.
As Bhat notes, his characters “largely live their own lives, deal with their own problems, and exist independently of the fact that they inhabit the same space. This becomes a parable of globalization, but in a literary text.”
Bhat continues: “I wanted to imagine a globalism, but one that was bottom-to-top, and using globalism to imagine new terrains, for the sake of fiction, for the sake of humanity’s intellectual growth.”
“These are stories that could be directly ripped from our headlines. I think each of these stories is very much its own vignette, and each of these vignettes gives a lot of insight into human nature, as a whole.”
we of the forsaken world takes pride of place next to such notable literary works as David Mitchell’s CLOUD ATLAS, a finalist for the prestigious Man Booker Prize for 2004, and Mohsin Hamid’s EXIT WEST, which was listed by the New York Times as one of its Best Books of 2017.
Bhat’s epic also stands comfortably with the works of contemporary visionaries such as Umberto Eco, Haruki Murakami, and Philip K. Dick.
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