SEEKING FORTUNE ELSEWHERE by Sindya Bhanoo

“Graceful stories by a writer with enormous empathy for even the most flawed and forlorn among us.”

seeking fortune elsewhere

power of the imagination and the lives it enables us to live when our own seem painfully circumscribed by gender, by place, by circumstance.

A kaleidoscopic and ambitious blend of criticism, autofiction, fable, and memoir.

SEEKING FORTUNE ELSEWHERE

Bhanoo, Sindya Catapult (240 pp.) $26.00 | March 8, 2022 978-1-64622-087-8

Eight stories of dislocation—cultural and geographic, familial and romantic. An elderly woman parked in a “retirement-community-cum-old-age-home” in Coimbatore, India, by her well-meaning daughter, who lives in the United States, tells a lie that restores a little of her agency but also underscores how empty her life has become. A mother realizes that she has not been invited on her daughter’s buddymoon, a recent fad of newly wedded couples heading off on honeymoons with friends and family, but her exhusband’s girlfriend has. A professor is accused of taking advantage of his graduate students, all Indian immigrants like him, by asking them to do chores around his house. Bhanoo, a longtime newspaper reporter, homes in on devastating moments of loss— the results of aging, cultural misunderstanding, so-called progress, fickle hearts, and even tragedy—throughout this stunning debut collection of stories. The professor, who sees himself in his graduate students, thousands of miles from India, completing their studies in small college towns like Bozeman, Montana, can’t reconcile his sense of himself as treating them “like family, because their own families were so far away” with the charge that he took advantage of them. In “Nature Exchange,” a wrenching story about a woman whose son was killed in a school shooting, Veena returns obsessively to the nature center where children can trade found objects like sand dollars and dead insects for points to be redeemed for prizes. Before his death, her little boy was saving up for a pair of antlers. Now, as she struggles to move on with her life, Veena fixates on the antlers as though they might free her from her grief. These are psychologically astute stories—and also riveting. By carefully withholding key details, Bhanoo transforms human drama into mystery.

Graceful stories by a writer with enormous empathy for even the most flawed and forlorn among us.

THE SELFLESS ACT OF BREATHING

Bola, JJ Atria (272 pp.) $23.99 | Feb. 15, 2022 978-1-9821-7556-6

A British schoolteacher descends into despair and travels to America as a last hurrah in this dark, powerful novel. On the first page, we’re introduced to Michael Kabongo, a Congolese British schoolteacher who is waiting in London’s Heathrow Airport for a flight that will take him to California. He’s not traveling for pleasure. “I quit my job,” he explains. “I am taking my life savings, $9,021, and when it runs out, I am going to kill myself.” Michael’s descent into hopelessness has been a bit of a slow burn—he’s grown disillusioned with his job, where he’s tasked with wrangling restive kids. (“Cause of death: unknown—may involve rude, screaming children and