Fire Girl: Essays on India, America, and the In-Between

In Fire Girl, her debut collection of essays, Sayantani Dasgupta examines her personal story against the history, religion, popular culture and mythology of South Asia and her current home in the American West.

Praise for Fire Girl

These are exquisite essays, filled with savory language spiced just right. Sayantani Dasgupta’s generous intelligence and lively curiosity bring alive whole worlds—those of ancient stories and those of daily living, artfully considered. Cultures, languages, religions, landscapes, legacies—this is a writer who contains multitudes. —Peggy Shumaker, Author of Just Breathe Normally

Sayantani Dasgupta writes with such keen intelligence and vivid clarity that we can’t help be taken in. Lyrical, compassionate, and compelling, these beautiful essays transport us to another world. In Dasgupta’s able hands, it is a world we come to recognize as our own. —Kim Barnes, Author of In the Kingdom of Men

Sayantani Dasgupta brings together past and present as she considers childhood, violence, safety, family, monsters, goddesses, and the concept of home. These beautiful essays move between India and America, between selves and versions of selves, as Sayantani considers what is real and what is story or indeed, how the two are ever different. The range of landscapes and subjects is as breathtaking as the writing, showing us a powerful mind at work.—Bich Minh Nguyen, Author of Stealing Buddha's Dinner

The oscillations in the essays are sometimes gentle vibrations, other times beating drums, encompassing the tension between the home and the world, the past and the present, the brain and the heart. The stories constantly go away and come back and we undulate with them, rippling between delight, sorrow, rage, wonder. —Aurvi Sharma, Winner of the 2015 Gulf Coast Prize in Nonfiction: