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a solid visual representation of me in a bookstore

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"The Dance", Siamanto (translated by Peter Balakian)

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"The Unbearable Lightness of Being", Milan Kundera (translated by Michael Henry Heim)

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Frederic Leighton (English, 1830-1896)

Idyll

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Dreaming of Pomegranates, Felice Casorati

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August Schmidt - The Siren Lorelei

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'The Silent Voice' by Gerald Moira, c. 1893.

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Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

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somewhere, there's a party

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— Mahmoud Darwish, Another Road in the Road

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She wanted to scream, but a person who is alone—alone in the absolute sense of the word—does not scream out her despair; it is useless. Deserts do not hear. But she can do things with her hands which even a desert must notice. She can tear at the sand until the desert bleeds.

– Stig Dagerman, from “Men of Character,” The Games of Night (Quartet, 1986)

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Czeslaw Milosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001

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Fyodor Dostoevsky, from The Idiot

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Unfortunately for South Asian writing, what the publishing industry has decided is best for Western readers is pandering, cliché-heavy, lunch-buffet fiction that’s easy to digest and doesn’t contain too many weird, foreign ingredients.

“Those books” Thayil refers to are South Asian diaspora novels about the Indian subcontinent. Mangoes, spices, and monsoons. I’ll add saris, bangles, oppressive husbands/fathers, arranged marriages, grains of rice, jasmine, virgins, and a tacky, overproduced Bollywood dance of rejection and obsession with Western culture. The frustration Thayil expresses has been echoed by other South Asian writers and readers who don’t identify with the stories and struggles presented in many of the South Asian novels published in the West from 2000 forward — the era ushered forth by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Interpreter of Maladies and all the copycats that followed. They see nothing of the real India, or the real Pakistan, or the real Bangladesh, or the other real South Asian communities reflected in these novels, which are designed for a primarily white reading public. What they do see are stereotypes — a colonialist “jewel in the crown” version of the subcontinent that includes tall servants named Raj and palm fronds, mosquito nets and teatime and exiles longing to return to their super romantic homeland. In much contemporary literature, South Asians are exotic little creatures fluttering about in glass jars for the bemusement of monocle-clutching Western observers.

[…]

Perhaps this seems a highly cynical position. How can it be that South Asian novels, primarily written by South Asians and published by the intellectual one-percenters in cosmopolitan centers who understand the world and wish, through literature, to edify it for the rest of us, skew the reality of South Asia and its people?

Jabeen Akhtar, Why Am I Brown? South Asian Fiction and Pandering to Western Audiences