“Imaginative, informed, at times brash, Anis Shivani will go far.”—The Brooklyn Rail
In these eleven stories of novelistic breadth and ambition, global tensions and harmonies come alive as rarely seen in contemporary fiction. Shivani takes the measure of the fallout from globalization as well as its advantages, exploring diverse cultures to gauge their ultimate resiliencies. 
An undocumented Indian worker in Dubai, an Issei man in a California internment camp, a persecuted Baha’i novelist in contemporary Tehran, a Chinese-American conservator at a Boston museum, a Hungarian gypsy girl in 1950s rural Indiana, a dissatisfied Muslim industrialist in post-independence India, and a loyal-to-the-core Jewish trader in the Ottoman empire—these are the kinds of strong, sympathetic, fully realized characters who bridge place and individuality in this powerful collection. The genre of multicultural/postcolonial short fiction will never be the same again. These stories push us to confront the hardest intellectual challenges of the emerging world, while never letting go of narrative urgency, concision, and lyrical power. 
“Anis Shivani demonstrates his versatility as a writer as he takes us around the globe in stories that juxtapose old and new, east and west, with characters that do their best to navigate the generational/religious/cultural/socio-economic tensions inherent in our global economy. Shivani’s observations are dead-on, especially when dealing with themes of loss, family dynamics, and the subtleties of power. This is a solid collection that offers the best of all worlds: skilled writing flavored with detailed cultural nuances in stories that are timeless and universal.”—Laila Halaby, PEN/Beyond Margins Award-winning author of Once in a Promised Land
“Anis Shivani has an enviable narrative reach. He populates worlds that are psychologically compelling, socially acute, and morally challenging. Reading Anatolia and Other Stories, we feel that life has been lived deeply and then—the hard part—served up fresh to the senses.”—Sven Birkerts, author of The Gutenberg Elegies and My Sky Blue Trades
“I've read these stories with intense interest. Anis Shivani is an original, and his work interrogates the historical moment with insight and passion. He looks at this mysterious thing called ‘multiculturalism’ with a fresh eye, never accepting the status quo, always probing and thinking. The forces that keep a lid on emerging thought, on sharp political thinking, had better take cover. This is unusual and interesting work.”—Jay Parini, author of Benjamin’s Crossing and The Apprentice Lover
“Anis Shivani's debut collection of stories reveals him to be one of the most exciting young writers in the States. What I especially admire in his work is the seamless union of his extraordinary intelligence with his intensely empathetic feelings for his characters and for the endlessly mysterious experience of existence itself.”—Richard Burgin, author of The Identity Club and The Conference on Beautiful Moments
“In Anatolia and Other Stories, Anis Shivani does no less than deliver a world. Read together, these smart, sure stories form wild, magnetic patterns on the brain; I'm left believing that seemingly random occurrences might add up to something more than what I'd imagined.”—Julie Shigekuni, PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award-winning author of Invisible Gardens
“Contemporary American fiction tends to favor style over substance, inactivity over action, ambivalence over judgment, irony over assertion, solipsism over a wide and encompassing worldview. As Nobel secretary Horace Engdahl recently noted, the U.S. doesn't participate in the world's ongoing literary dialogue. But now comes Anis Shivani and his first book of fiction, Anatolia and Other Stories. Already known for his penetrating, erudite, and brutally honest literary essays, Shivani has now joined the ranks of America's best fictioneers. The echoes we hear in these short stories harken back to the masters, Chekhov, Anderson, Kleist, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Flaubert, James, Kipling and Sartre. No postmodern games here, no winking coyness—just solid, international storytelling. No new voice in recent memory is as weighted with intelligence and understanding of the human animal as that of Anis Shivani. To be sure, Engdahl spoke too soon.”—Eric Miles Williamson, PEN/Hemingway Award-finalist author of East Bay Grease

Anatolia and Other Stories

Literature & Fiction

Shivani, Anis

United States

Black Lawrence Press

Soraya is a series of 100 sonnets which take the exuberance of sound as the beginning (and end) point of meaning: it is a driven experiment in the baroque potentialities of sonic texture, poetic "technique" both provoked to the extreme and deconstructed in its very creation.

Soraya

Poetry

Commonwealth Books, Black Widow

Most political analysts were taken by surprise by Donald Trump’s success during the campaign and even more so by his eventual win. The author of this book consistently predicted victory for Trump over Hillary Clinton, should the Democratic party fail to nominate Bernie Sanders, which is precisely what happened. Removing the analysis from matters of personality and contingency, this book seeks to identify the larger institutional and economic changes that have resulted in a rank political outsider such as Trump taking complete power in Washington and sidelining the liberal opposition in every branch of government. Is Trump a fascist, an authoritarian populist, a right-wing extremist, or someone who fits into an established pattern of American conservatism? Was identity politics the biggest loser in the election? What is the future of the Democratic party’s appeal to and patronage by the financial class, and what happens when the other party is able to shear off, by demagogic appeals, a large part of the coalition that needs to hold if the meritocratic/neoliberal vision of the financial class is to achieve electoral success? Is there any chance that the Democratic party will undertake philosophical reform and go back to its original base from before the neoliberal ascendancy? Does neoliberalism explain everything that happened in this election, or are there residual factors outside this explanatory framework? How did the press, and the establishment in general, get it so wrong on so many counts throughout the last two years of buildup to this election, and what chance is there for accountability and course correction according to the facts on the ground? What is the Trump coalition? What is Trumpism? What should we expect from this movement, and what should we not? These and other crucial questions have assumed life-and-death importance for the body politic, especially for embattled minority groups feeling betrayed and abandoned by establishment politicians and intellectuals who failed to see the truth of what was going on in the country. These questions are addressed with stimulating clarity and vision in this book of essays that unfolds in real time along with the surge of populism on both left and right in the historic election campaign. The next chapter in American politics is only beginning. This book provides a sound intellectual platform from which to interpret and anticipate the direction of events in the age of Trump.

Why Did Trump Win?: Chronicling the Stages of Neoliberal Reactionism During America's Most Turbulent Election Cycle

Politics & Social Sciences

Politics & Government

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Praise for Whatever Speaks on Behalf of Hashish 
 “Startlingly fecund, culturally shrewd, grounded in bright particulars and sly juxtapositions, Anis Shivani shows us with diamond brilliance what happens when language takes leave of its day job to exult in its real power. No longer the bean counter of ordinary doings, it becomes its own freedom, conscious of itself as beacon of what we could achieve, were we to realize the wisdom of Emerson’s remark that the ultimate American trope is surprise.” 
 — David Rigsbee, author of School of the Americas and Not Alone in My Dancing: Essays and Reviews 
 “These poems are an homage to all that is ‘great’ about humanity, but, and maybe more importantly, they are also a skeptical, intelligent, and necessary confrontation with that greatness. Which is to say, Anis Shivani is in conversation with the best—the best poets, writers, and thinkers, from antiquity to now—and he is handling his own, with gravitas, humor, and originality.” 
 — Hayan Charara, author of The Alchemist’s Diary and editor of Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry 
 “Writing to, about, after and through poets and poetry, picking through erotic detritus and stylistic loot, all’s unfair game in Whatever Speaks on Behalf of Hashish. Somewhere between a cry in the wilderness and a survival guide, taking whatever it takes from colonizers who themselves took it from the colonized, glutted with image and strung together with deadly sense: this is a big book, a full book, fevered and horny and tired. A cry is a compromised song, or a song is an ornate cry. Anis Shivani is a poet calling out to poets, seeking how a poet can and won’t survive.” 
 — Kate Schapira, author of How We Saved the City and The Soft Place 
 “Both arresting and inventive, Anis Shivani’s new poems reveal a rich sense of wonder at this complex thing we call humanity. Smart, unflinching, and relevant—this book demands rereading.” 
 — Ryan G. Van Cleave, author of The Florida Letters and editor of City of the Big Shoulders: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry

Whatever Speaks on Behalf of Hashish

BlazeVOX Books

The Moon Blooms in Occupied Hours

In Literary Writing in the 21st Century an incredible array of today’s leading fiction writers, poets, critics, editors, publishers, and booksellers engage in no-holds-barred dialogue about the challenging issues facing writing and publishing today. Whether it’s the impact of innovative technologies, proliferation of new modes of teaching and learning, changing economic dynamics for publishers, shifting criteria to judge quality writing in a global context, or redefinitions of authorship amidst larger cultural changes, this book provides a cornucopia of strongly articulated opinions. It also serves as a manual for students enrolled in formal programs of creative writing, as well as those pursuing writing independently. Deploying his signature wit and unconventional insights, these wide-ranging cultural conversations are mediated by one of our most thought-provoking literary critics and are sure to prompt spirited dialogue both inside and outside the classroom.

Literary Writing in the 21st Century: Conversations

History & Criticism

Texas Review Press

Against the Workshop is the first sustained critique of twenty-first century literary production in America under the MFA/creative writing program infrastructure. Since earlier critics like John Aldridge wrote on the subject, the creative writing regime has become vastly more institutionalized. Publishing has changed, but what does it mean for the quality of fiction and poetry? This book brings the subject completely up-to-date, by focusing on fiction and poetry generated during the last decade. The book contrasts the vast amount of sludge with the rare gems, to argue that the creative writing product is a debased one that will not stand the test of time.

Against the Workshop: Provocations, Polemics, Controversies

Poetry. Composed over the last decade, MY TRANQUIL WAR AND OTHER POEMS tackles head-on the response of the poet in a time of great political turmoil. What is the poet's special responsibility? When terror becomes a general condition of dread, internalized to the last degree, even beauty and truth assume grotesque masks. The poet surveys the breakage of culture, occurring both retrospectively and in the present, and is left speechless—and potentially harmless. No one is exempt from the brutality, there are no excuses. The danger for poetry in such times is that it can become slave to technique and self-worship, in love with its own grandiosity. Thus these poems, written in a remarkable variety of forms—from traditional sonnets to experiments in found poetry—constantly rub up against self-limitation, and in that effort alone, the desire to discover a voice appropriate for the times, turn what could have been relentless elegy into an often transcendent sphere of holiness and refuge. There are, after all, beauty and truth, in the expected places; to plunge after them, one only needs all the arsenal of past culture, although the baggage may well be disposable and contingent. The poet's fate, it turns out, is a central determinant, a surefire clue to the future, as empire relentlessly falls apart, past illusions shatter, dreams fail to suffice, and a new humanity emerges, almost against its will. The fiery apocalypse of the soul, negated at its core, at a time when the public and the private merge like inseparable warring twins, is what MY TRANQUIL WAR AND OTHER POEMS tries to capture, in poetry carefully treading the fault lines of sacredness, when nothing is labeled as such."Anis Shivani's writing seeks sanctuary by looking poetry and its makers (and a stray president to boot) squarely in the face."—Eileen Myles"I sense everywhere an undercurrent of compassion and identification, a poignant humanity and sense of responsibility underneath the torrential voice of his book."—Franz Wright

My Tranquil War and Other Poems

NYQ Books

Fiction. Middle Eastern Studies. Whither the Islamic world? Whither Pakistan? Revolution is on the streets of the Arab/Islamic world, Pakistan is experiencing a remote drone war and violence fomented by mysterious forces, and writing has apparently thrown up its hands at making sense of the chaos.Ten years after the start of the perpetual war on terror, Pakistan, the country at the fulcrum of it, remains a mystery. All we hear about are lawlessness and violence, without social history or political context to fill out the picture. THE FIFTH LASH AND OTHER STORIES gives us a portrait of Pakistan, and Muslims in general, struggling to reason their way into a better future. Paranoia, self-hatred, delusion, insecurity, serfdom, surveillance, and denial have been some of the prevalent psychological motifs of the last decade; it's important to step outside their journalistic confines and move into the lyrical borderline where responsibility follows a two-way street and causes and consequences become muddled and merged, and this is what the book seeks to do.The old securities everywhere are gone; identities are switched and tried on and abandoned faster than ever; the media landscape saturates individual consciousness, and makes lies out of centuries of tradition and heroes of plastic idols. THE FIFTH LASH AND OTHER STORIES daringly enters this phantasmagoric cauldron, where appearance and reality have seamlessly blended, to complicate the picture even further, to turn all we think we know about Islam and Pakistan on its head. The "truth" will never set you free, is the ironic signature of the original voice defining this collection.

The Fifth Lash and Other Stories

C&R Press

Poetry. LOGOGRAPHY: A POETRY OMNIBUS brings together three collections of extraordinarily vigorous and electric poetry from the quicksilver mind of Anis Shivani: Confessions II, Lyric/Resistance, and The Art of Love.

Logography: A Poetry Omnibus

Sagging Meniscus Press

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Books by Shivani, Anis