A Life of Adventure and Delight - Tapa dura

Readers wade into these stories as though stepping into a calm river only to be caught by the undercurrent of the most devastating kind--the demand of everyday existence. Akhil Sharma's words touch the deep experience that often remains wordless. He is truly the Chekhov of our time.--Yiyun Li, author of Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life

One reads Akhil Sharma's stories as one might watch waves approach the shore on which one stands, understanding that something unseen and powerful is driving them. The waves and the stories are beautiful, deceptively simple, and potentially dangerous.--Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer

Those seeking quiet moments of revelation will find them here.

[H]aunting, revelatory stories. . . . Sharma is boldly forthright and probing. Focusing exclusively on Indian characters, both in Delhi and in the New York metropolitan area, he brings a keen cultural awareness to each of these stories. . . . perceptive, humane, and pointed.

Sharma's sentences are simple, but what they add up to is so curious and complex.--David Sedaris

[E]ight divine stories about all-too-human relationships.

If you love short story collections, this one's for you. A Life of Adventure and Delight offers a window into the Indian experience both in America and abroad. Author Akhil Sharma's characters aren't perfect -- they wrestle with belonging, tradition, and temptation -- but they're heartbreakingly real and relatable, even at their worst.

These stories have a psychological acuity that redeems their dark worldview.

Hailed as a storyteller whose fiction is “a glowing work of art” (Wall Street Journal), Akhil Sharma is possessed of a narrative voice “as hypnotic as those found in the pages of Dostoyevsky” (The Nation). In A Life of Adventure and Delight, Sharma delivers eight masterful stories that focus on Indian protagonists at home and abroad and that plunge the reader into the unpredictable workings of the human heart.A young woman in an arranged marriage awakens one day surprised to find herself in love with her husband. A retired divorcé tries to become the perfect partner by reading women’s magazines. A man’s longstanding contempt for his cousin suddenly shifts inward when he witnesses his cousin caring for a sick woman. Tender and darkly comic, the protagonists in A Life of Adventure and Delight deceive themselves and engage in odd behaviors as they navigate how to be good, how to make meaningful relationships, and the strengths and pitfalls of self-interest. Elegantly written and emotionally immediate, the stories provide an intimate, honest assessment of human relationships between mothers and sons, sons and lovers, and husband and wives from a dazzlingly original, critically acclaimed writer.