Rav Grewal-Kök’s first novel,
The Snares, is published by Random House.
[
Q&A with Rav Grewal-Kök]
His stories have appeared in
The Atlantic,
Ploughshares, the
New England Review,
Missouri Review,
Gulf Coast,
The White Review, and elsewhere. He has won an NEA fellowship in prose and is a fiction editor at
Fence.
Grewal-Kök grew up in Hong Kong and on Vancouver Island and now lives in Los Angeles.
At Electric Lit the author tagged eight books "that address the depredations of the state... [yet] offer consolation. They show that the bad times aren’t ours alone." One title on the list:
The Little Book of Terror by Daisy Rockwell
Rockwell’s brief and beautiful exploration of the limits of empathy juxtaposes her paintings of subjects from the first decade of the War on Terror with essays and personal reminiscences. Rockwell is a renowned translator from the Hindi 
(including of Gitanjali Shree’s International Booker Prize-winning novel Tomb of Sand), as well as an accomplished visual artist. Though she is Norman Rockwell’s granddaughter, she seems to paint, as Amitava Kumar notes in his introduction, more in the tradition of lurid, decades-old Bollywood film posters. Here she depicts a stylized, pink-skinned Osama bin Laden in his death mask, blood or flame obscuring his face; Saddam Hussein after his capture, enfeebled and wrapped in a shroud; and many lesser villains (and innocent victims) of that era. But she also paints the Abu Ghraib torturers Charles Granier and Lynndie England in a smiling, tender moment, as well as her own friends and colleagues, and images of the little green men her father became obsessed with in his old age. Throughout she challenges us to recognize the humanity of the other—including the most alien or despised among those Dick Cheney called “the worst of the worst.” She offers an alternative to the totalizing narrative of the state at war, and warns us to resist its colonization of the self. “Why do they hate us, indeed,” she writes. “And who are they? And who are we?”
Read about
the other entries on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
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