Book description
A Bengal tiger wakes up one morning realising he is ravenously in love.
A pompous railway supervisor in a small Indian village bites off more
than he can chew when a peculiar new clerk arrives on his doorstep. In
another place and in another time, a secret agent who spends her days
watching the front door of an unknown quarry discovers something she
isn't meant to. An immigrant housewife in an American suburb geeing up
for Thanksgiving makes a wish she may come to regret. And a small and
famous country's only executioner claims his conscience is as clean as
his heavy, washed stones.
With this glittering, savage and elegant first collection, where reality
loops in mind-bending twists and dazzles with cinematic exuberance,
where frayed photographs take on a life of their own and where elephants
wish only to die with dignity, Rajesh Parameswaran bursts onto the
literary landscape as an astonishing new talent. His narrative
virtuosity - his relentless forcing of the reader to readjust to new
fictive surroundings, to play the game of getting to grips with who is
speaking, where, and how we interpret it - makes I Am an Executioner
peculiarly distinctive Times Literary Supplement
Rajesh Parameswaran was born in Chennai, India and moved to the
United States as an infant. His short stories have appeared in Granta
, McSweeney's
, Zoetrope: All-Story
and Fiction
. 'The Strange Career of Doctor Raju Gopalarajan' was one of three
stories for which McSweeney's
won the National Magazine Award for Fiction in 2007, and it was
included in The Best American Magazine Writing
and in The United States of McSweeney's: Ten Years of Accidental Classics
. Rajesh Parameswaran lives in New York.
