vandana singh at ecstatic days

[jlundberg]

One of my favorite new voices in speculative fiction is Vandana Singh. There's a lovely otherworldliness about her prose that shares a lot in common with Kelly Link and Aimee Bender, whom I also adore. She's published in various places, but her short fiction will be captured in book form soon in The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories from Zubaan Books; but if you can't wait, her novella Of Love and Other Monsters came out earlier this year from Aqueduct Press. I'm eager to get my hands on both of these.

Singh guest-blogged last week at Jeff VanderMeer's site Ecstatic Days, and her posts have been remarkable and incredibly thoughtful. It makes me wish that she would blog more often, although her entries have been closer to essays, and, I imagine, took quite a bit of time. I highly recommend checking them out, as well as the comments and responses for each:

1. Paradigm Shifts and the Reading/Writing Life
2. The Decolonization of the Mind
3. In Search of Indian Science Fiction: A Conversation with Anil Menon
4. Women Writing in India: A Conversation with Urvashi Butalia and Anita Roy
6. The Creatures We Don’t See: Thoughts on the Animal Other
7. Science Fiction and the End of the World

These essays show an incredible awareness of the world, and wonderful facility with language. It's easy to see, reading her fiction, how good a writer she is, but it's also impressive how well she handles non-fiction too.