Finalist for the 2022 LAMBDA literary award in bisexual nonfictionWinner of the 2021 Gournay Prize**“Shimmers with honesty, vulnerability, and circumspection.” —Kirkus“Sirisena explores how stories can become a ‘talisman against the overwhelming darkness of another’s pain’ in her emotionally charged nonfiction debut … [Her] searching spirit leaves readers with plenty to dig into.” —Publishers Weekly**Dark t...

Set in Sri Lanka and America, the ten short stories in this debut collection feature characters struggling to contend with the brutality of a decades-long civil war while also seeking security, love, and hope. The characters are students, accountants, soldiers, servants. They are immigrants and strivers. They are each forced to make sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, choices. What they share, despite what they've endured, is the sustaining power of human connection.An excerpt from ...

This anthology of eight short stories and eight narrative essays depicts diverse facets of the South Asian experience in the American South. Some of them relate to the proverbial longing for what the immigrants have left behind, while the others spotlight the immigrants’ struggles to reconcile with realities they did not sign up for. In Chaitali Sen’s “The Immigrant,” Dhruv is unable to talk about a lost boy because he feels “as if he were trapping the boy with his story,” as if the lost b...