Praise for Shubha Venugopal
A passionate writer! Her work explores the lives of Indian-Americans - focusing on the conflict between loyalty to tradition and personal identity. Shubha tells a story with a compassionate eye and a search for truth.
--Elizabeth Cox, The Slow Moon: A Novel; Night Talk; The Ragged Way People Fall Out of Love; Bargains in the Real World.
Shubha Venugopal is a terrific writer: astute, knowledgeable and inspired. Her style is vibrant and strong, and she has an instinctive ability to discover and nurture the best aspects of her talent. Her prose is fluid, her vision is keen and lovely.
--Les Plesko, Slow Lie Detector; Last Bongo Sunset: A Novel.
[For our anthology] we suggested the now canonical work, "The Third and Final Continent" by Jhumpa Lahiri, to potential contributors as a fine example of our theme. . . We were pleased to consider many émigré stories that recalled Lahiri's discernment, notably. . . Shubha Venugopal's "Bhakthi in the Water."
--Introduction, A Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cross Cultural Collision and Connection, Editor: Stacy Bierlein.
A Stranger Among Us gives the reader a new pair of eyes through which to see ourselves and lets us into stories of people we may have never known otherwise. . . This collection offers a goldmine of authentic voices and stories to be treasured. . . We see how difficult it can be to adjust to new customs and a strange society in Shubha Venugopal's "Bhakthi in the Water," as an Indian woman learns how to swim after living in America for decades hardly leaving her house.
--Review by Beverly Jenkins-Crockett, Feminist Studies
The founding editor of Other Voices Books, Bierlein has compiled 30 stories about the experiences of travelers and immigrants with unfamiliar people in foreign lands. . . Overall, their stories are engaging, moving, and well written. . . "Bhakthi in the Water" is about a middle-aged Indian woman in the United States who gets over her divorce and the death of her mother as she overcomes her fear of water. Recommended for comprehensive short fiction collections.
--Review by Christina Bauer, Library Journal
With an eye to short stories stemming from diverse cultures and exploring the state of outsiderness, editor Bierlein has selected 30 vibrant, unpredictable, and magnetic works that together span the spectrum from funny to tragic, earthy to rarefied. Stories of sharp revelation and resonance are triggered by moments small or wrenching, such as the swimming lesson in Shubha Venugopal's "Bhakthi in the Water". . . [M]any new or underrecognized writers reconfigure the human experience in this richly kaleidoscopic anthology.
--Review by Donna Seaman, Booklist
In "No Time" Venugopal uses poetic language to tell a story. A man nurses his mother and is unable to grieve. After her death he tries to put things in order, clean up, bring physical closure. When he runs across a letter she wrote to him when she was still alive he is finally able to express his grief. It's a simple story, but a true one and told in a brilliant way.
--Donovan Hall, The Angler
The latest addition to STORYGLOSSIA Issue 20 is "Difference" by Shubha Venugopal, which, as the title suggests, thrives on dichotomies. It\'s those manipulations of language and the wealth of particular details that elevates what is essentially a flat narrative line until the exchange of dialogue on the home stretch shows the black hole in the relationship.
--Steven J. McDermott, editor, Storyglossia
"A Diamond Comes Into a Knot of Flame," [by] Shubha Venugopal [is] a beautiful essay on the transformative power of the written word, inspiring and direct, passionate but perfectly controlled.
--Andrew Todhunter, A Meal Observed; Dangerous Games: Ice Climbing, Storm Kayaking, And Other Adventures from the Extreme Edge of Sports; Fall of the Phantom Lord: Climbing and the Face of Fear.
