Politics & Prose at Busboys and Poets 14th & V welcomes Kanishk Tharoor to present their new book "Swimmer Among the Stars: Stories."
Tharoor’s debut collection of short fiction is a masterful tapestry of ancient events and current headlines, in which lush romance crops up beside the raw experience of refugees. Tharoor, now based in New York, was the presenter for BBC Radio 4’s “Museum of Lost Objects,” a ten-part series on cultural destruction in the Middle East, and he writes about both anthropologists and relics, Genghis Khan’s armies and diplomats in a post-apocalyptic Manhattan beset by rising seas. While skillfully evoking the individual characters, such as the last living speaker of an ancient language or a whimsical Moroccan princess, he also illuminates larger themes of cultural appropriation and environmental devastation.
