Rajesh
Parameswaran

Of writing, Rajesh Parameswaran says, “For me, [it is] play in the fullest sense of the word. I really like doing it. I feel lucky to be able to do it.” Encountering this deep sense of playfulness is one of the chief pleasures of reading his virtuosic and inventive fiction; Parameswaran’s stories are daring, funny, and possessed of a stealth sadness and poignancy that give them dimension, each a unique, engrossing world illuminated by his radiant intelligence and wit. One of the most original writers working today, he writes in the lineage of Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, and Vladimir Nabokov, crafting elegant sentences that delight the reader with language’s potential and that create unforgettable stories. In each, the beauty, humor, and tragedy of the world recombine in kaleidoscopic fashion, taking on entrancing new shapes.

Parameswaran’s debut story collection, I Am an Executioner: Love Stories (Knopf, 2012), written over the course of a decade, has earned wide praise. The nine stories explore the contradictions at the heart of love: how love can blind us to even the most obvious truths, what it means to fall prey to one’s passions, what it means to love someone and to harm them despite—or even because of—that love. The settings range widely, both in terms of place and time. Some stories feature Indian and Indian American characters, one a Texas man who, laid off from his job as a salesman, pretends to be a doctor; he opens a medical practice in a strip mall and begins to see patients, which goes about as well as one might imagine. Others focus on animal protagonists (a tiger in love with the zookeeper; an escaped circus elephant). A story set in 2319 on a planet in the Andromeda Galaxy concerns insect-like aliens and their relationship to the humans who have colonized their home. This exhilarating range of situations and places is matched by an exhilarating range of forms: one story makes novel use of the footnote; another adopts the form of a surveillance report.

Born in Chennai, India, Parameswaran emigrated to the United States as an infant, accompanied by his parents and older brother. His family lived in Michigan for eight years before moving to Houston, Texas, a city that he calls “flawed and wonderful.” He attended college and law school at Yale University and has traveled widely. His fiction appears in Granta, McSweeney’s, Zoetrope: All Story, and his stories and essays are anthologized in the Best American Magazine Writing and the Best American Food Writing series. He has served as the Picador Guest Professor for Literature at the University of Leipzig and has been recognized with a National Magazine Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the MacDowell Colony, and the Ucross Foundation, among other. He lives in New York City.

Text: Cara Blue Adams