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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
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English
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ALL THE NAMES THEY USED FOR GOD

Anjali Sachdeva

Stories

A haunting, debut story collection that explores the isolation we experience in the face of the powerful, mysterious, often dangerous forces that shape our lives—by Iowa MFA graduate Anjali Sachdeva.
ALL THE NAMES THEY USED FOR GOD spans centuries, continents, and a diverse set of characters—but is united by each character's epic struggle with fate.

In one story, a young woman created through genetic manipulation is destroyed by the same force that gave her life.

In another, a workman in Andrew Carnegie’s steel mills is turned into a medical oddity by the brutal power of the furnaces—and eventually revitalized by that same deformity.

Other protagonists include: a kidnapped woman who uses magic to escape her captors, but becomes a victim of her own powers; a fisherman who finds himself mentally unhinged by a brush with the supernatural.

Sachdeva's stories have a way of pointing out unique truths about our society and humanity. Each of her stories are research-based, exquisitely balancing the fantastical elements with a grounded scientific basis. The inspiration for many of her stories begins with a piece of history: e.g., the kidnapping of young women by Boko Haram; John Milton's writing Paradise Lost.

Anjali Sachdeva’s fiction has been published widely. She counts Dave Eggers and Kelly Link among her literary admirers, as well as Chris Offut, and Kevin Brockmeier. Her short story “Baby” won the Orange/Northern Woman Short Story prize. She is a former editor at Unstuck, a journal of the futuristic, the fantastic, the surreal, and the strange, which featured work from Aimee Bender, Amelia Gray, Etgar Keret, Jonathan Lethem, Elizabeth McCracken, and Joe Meno. She currently teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. At the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, she received the Teaching Writing Fellowship and Provost’s Fellowship.
Available products
Book

Published 2018-02-20 by Spiegel & Grau

Book

Published 2018-02-20 by Spiegel & Grau

Comments

ALL THE NAMES THEY USED FOR GOD is Longlisted for the Story Prize! Read more...

Gripping... provides a haiku-esque glimpse into the infinite mind of an individual while revealing how the seeming trivialities of life can reverberate with meaning... The author has created perfect, complete micro-universes that lure the reader in to the dark depths of literature like siren song.

"20 New Books to Read in February": This ambitious debut short-story collection spans centuries and continents in its panorama of characters in pursuit of the sublime. Read more...

This is the first time I've considered a short story collection to be my favorite book of the year. It's a captivating gem. Each story is its own imaginative microcosm, making for a dazzling collection of wildly different yet equally brilliant tales, full of the glaring obviousness of mortality in a dark and disorganized world. From a woman who decides she'd prefer to live underground in tunnels like a mole, to a man who becomes obsessed with a mermaid he spies from his ship, Sachdeva has written an unsettling compendium of life's absurdities that will swim around in your brain like little inky fish long after you've finished the last page. Read more...

So rich they read like dreams... a strikingly unified collection... Beautiful, drainingand entirely unforgettable.

With this book Anjali Sachdeva moved literature forward a notch, and moved the short story form a full revolution.Yes, it's that goodfresh, original, and moving.The prose is gorgeous and the characters still linger with me.I love this book.

Are you ever-so-slightly bitter that you, an adult, are supposed to have outgrown fairy tales by now? Don't worry - thanks to Sachdeva's debut short story collection, you can have fairy tales for grown-ups. The stories inAll the Names They Used For Godare myths told in spare, but effective, sentences. Even if they're set in the modern day, each imagines a world in which the possibility for magic isn't entirely ruled out."

...intriguing debut collection... These inventive stories will challenge readers to rethink how people cope with thwarted hopes.

All the Names They Used for God fuses science, myth, and imagination into a dark and gorgeous series of questions about our current predicaments. Sachdeva is a fascinating storyteller, willing to push her inventiveness as far as it will go, and I cannot wait to see what she writes next.

The stories in this collection read like fairy tales Brothers Grimm, not Disney. Anjali Sachdeva spins wondrous universes, governed by unknowable, capricious forces... Sachdeva draws characters with such empathy and precision that they pop off the page and take up residence in your brain - months after reading, I remember these stories as if they were dreams.

Terrific... Ms. Sachdeva's book, a debut, is notable for its exuberant variety... There's an element of whimsy to this assortment... The range of her gifts is best seen in the title story, about two young women who are forced to become child brides to Islamists but gradually turn the tables on their captors through the practice of mind control. The power they come to hold over the men - "a monster I hollowed out and made weak," one thinks of her husband - is a mark of their strength and resilience, but also proof that they too are capable of terrible cruelty. The story's delicate sadness mingles beautifully with the boldness of its conception.

[A] striking debut short story collection... enchanting and mesmerizing... Sachdeva's writing is carefully textured and nuanced. Each key scene... is also unfolded at just the right pace... reminiscent of Aimee Bender's and Kelly Link's excellent speculative works.

The stories in this collection read like fairy tales Brothers Grimm, not Disney. Anjali Sachdeva spins wondrous universes, governed by unknowable, capricious forces. Sachdeva draws characters with such empathy and precision that they pop off the page and take up residence in your brain months after reading, I remember these stories as if they were dreams. Read more...

Every once in a while you read a book with such power, craft, and originality, you know instantly that a new and important voice has arrived on the scene.This is that book.

Anjali Sachdeva's captivating debut collection All the Names They Used for God is a gloriously mystifying thrill.

Another new and equally impressive voice this season is Anjali Sachdeva, whose debut story collection All the Names They Used for God sprawls all over the usual territories of the genre, from the heartbreaking contemporary urgency of girls kidnapped by Boko Haram (the title story and in many ways the most wrenching piece in the collection) to the comparative rarity of historical science fiction... Sachdeva's stories almost seem to revel in their diversity; the book has surprises on virtually every page and touches on a host of philosophical and technological questions that feature both in the treatises Milton read (and wrote) and today's headlines. Science fiction has always been at its strongest when working exactly this kind of combination, and Sachdeva's first attempts at it are remarkable.

The strange and wonderful stories that make up Sachdeva's debut begin on this side of reality and slip to the other - often so gracefully, and with such a precise rendering of the fantastical, that we become inadvertent believers.delightfully unexpected.The brilliance of these stories - beyond the cool, precise artistry of their prose - is their embrace of both the known and the unknown, in a combination that feels truly original.

This phenomenal debut short story collection is filled with stories that bring the other-worldly to life and examine the strangeness of humanity.

ALL THE NAMES THEY USED FOR GOD was named one of the "21 Books We're Most Excited to Read in 2018". Read more...

ALL THE NAMES THEY USED FOR GOD is the Winner of the 2019 Chautauqua Prize Read more...

What an outstanding short story collection. I knew nothing about this book going in and was thrilled by each story. There is so much range here, and there is a nice fabulist edge to nearly all the stories. The writer wields so much confidence and control in her prose and my goodness, what imagination, what passion there is in this work. From one story to the next I felt like the writer knows everything about everything. One of the best collections I've ever read. Every single story is a stand out.

French: Albin Michel ; Japanese: Shueisha (serial)

The characters within Anjali Sachdeva's All the Names They Used for God couldn't be more different, nor their stories more diverse - and yet, they all feel connected because every single one is so deeply human. Incredibly original and full of wonder, the book features an eclectic variety of stories covering everything from genetically modified septuplets to John Milton's process while writing Paradise Lost. It's a fun, strange, and smart read. (8 New Books You'll Want to Read in February) Read more...

Every story in Anjali Sachdeva's new collection, All the Names They Used For God, grapples with the same topic: fate. Transcending time, place, and the characters within, the full collection will leave you reeling.

ALL THE NAMES THEY USED FOR GOD is the Winner of the 2018 Reading Women Award for Fiction Read more...

Anjali Sachdeva is a sorcerer, and these stories are magic. They are so skillfully told, and so absorbing, that they pass as swiftly as a song, yet they linger in the memory like a novel. I read them with total immersion and delight, and not a little envy.

Each of these stories is a perfect diorama: scrupulously assembled, complex, unsettling. Completing one is like having lived an entire life, and then being born, breathless, into another.

The nine short stories in this remarkable debut collection are utterly unique. They defy easy classification, chronologically or stylistically, becoming timeless and universal. They are triumphant, destructive, terrifying and therapeutic all at once. No matter her topic - be it alien overlords, a mermaid, an Egyptian tomb, a prairie cave that offers bleak deliverance, abducted child brides or cosmic retribution - Sachdeva is seemingly fearless and her talent limitless, as she memorably and devastatingly lays bare our humanity. (Must-Read books in 2018)

While the nine short stories in Anjali Sachdeva's debut collection don't necessarily belong to the horror genre, there's a merciless quality to them that will haunt readers long after the last page has turned. Spanning realism, science fiction, and everything in between, Sachdeva creates unique, convincing, and often gut-wrenching worlds in each of her pieces. Her richly-crafted characters - from two Boko Haram kidnapping victims forging new lives to humans faced with alien overlords who demand they replace their hands with metal prosthesis - will keep readers on their toes and the edge of their seats.

Anjali Sachdeva's debut, All the Names They Used for God, is a wide-ranging collection of stories that are a blend of fact and fiction, seamlessly integrating magical realism and the firmly earthbound... Sachdeva's spare, unsentimental writing is never more artfully deployed than in the title story, an emotionally scorching tale of two African women's kidnap and escape from a Boko Haram-type army. In captivity, the two women discover powers they never knew they could possess, but can their strength ever allow them to be the girls they once were? Sachdeva's eclectic stories span time and geography, packing a wallop even greater due to their diversity. It's a strong collection from start to finish, with not a weak story in the bunch.

"This story genuinely surprised me: in its setting and time period; in its characters and in their actions; in the pervasive feeling of almost uncanniness and accidental loss, of abandonment and beauty. Nothing here was predictable, and yet it seemed to me--I applaud them--the author stayed in control of their material and ideas in such a way that I remained in sympathy with all of their characters." -- Kelly Link, The Iowa Review (on "The World by Night," a runner-up in the 2016 Iowa Review Awards for fiction)

ALL THE NAMES THEY USED FOR GOD was featured on Goodreads as one of the "28 of the Season's Highest-Rated Debuts" Read more...

Sometimes we read something that just astounds and grabs and makes its way into the bones of everyone in the class. ... The story seemed to me some kind of small masterpiece ... and I went home feeling electric about the possibility of the written word.