#vajra chandrasekera

[torpublishinggroup]

GET BOOKT

A guide of books to gift the people in your life and yourself!

For the person who made a 200+ slide powerpoint about Neon Genesis Evangelion for a presentation party… Also for those who attend presentation parties…

The Archive Undying by @emcandon

For all former and current theater kids (affectionate)...

Will Do Magic for Small Change by Andrea Hairston

For the reader who prefers their off-the-wall science fiction tempered with social commentary, or enjoys social commentary in a space opera font…

The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport by Samit Basu

━ ˖°˖ ☾☆☽ ˖°˖ ━

For the friend with the SHUDDER account…

Piñata: A Novel by Leopoldo Gout

For the burned-out chosen one who’s so, so tired…

The Saint of Bright Doors by @adamantine

For the tumblr mutual that fell down the wuxia cdrama hole…

The Water Outlaws by S. L. Huang

━ ˖°˖ ☾☆☽ ˖°˖ ━

For the gamer who fondly remembers their confrontation with Rayquaza atop the Sky Pillar…

Untethered Sky by Fonda Lee

For the “smash first, questions later” friend in your life…

Ebony Gate by Julia Vee & Ken Bebelle

For a tragic superwholockian in dire need of restorative sapphic fiction…

The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older

━ ˖°˖ ☾☆☽ ˖°˖ ━

For the reader who wished Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was actually Jonathan Strange/Mr Norrell…

The Last Binding trilogy by @fahye, including: 

● A Marvellous Light

● A Restless Truth

● A Power Unbound

━ ˖°˖ ☾☆☽ ˖°˖ ━

Not enough books? We agree. Check out our other GET BOOKT guide.

#get bookt #booklr #tor books #tor publishing group #gift guide #the water outlaws #s l huang #ebony gate #julia vee #ken bebelle #untethered sky #fonda lee #the saint of bright doors #vajra chandrasekera #the mimicking of known successes #malka older #piñata #piñata: a novel #leopoldo gout #a marvellous light #a restless truth #a power unbound #freya marske #the archive undying #emma mieko candon #will do magic for small change #andrea hairston #the jinn-bot of shantiport #samit basu

[hussyknee]

I woke up to the news about Refaat Alreer. I still feel cold. Imagine seeing someone talking on your TL every day, narrating what the genociders are doing, counting the dead and telling their stories, amplifying his colleagues in Palestinian activism and academia, advocating and pleading endlessly for a ceasefire, delivering blistering witticisms about Zionist propaganda and then...he and his whole family are dead.

Two of my favourite tweets by him, calling out the craven Western media for never naming Israel.

It feels like a funeral today. My whole TL full of his students and Palestinians mourning Refaat alongside writers and journalists and academics from all over the Global South. The only people who matter to us is us.

Meanwhile, Zionists are attacking us under our mourning tweets, circulating the tweet where he laughed at the monstrous lie of Hamas cooking a baby in an oven during Oct 7th, one of the lies that fuelled the slaughter that eventually killed him too.

This was his last tweet.

USAmerican disability activist Imani Barbarin's tweet today was partially motivated by Refaat's death.

I need to go offline for a while.

I leave you with Refaat's last poem that was his pinned tweet for over a month. When a storyteller dies, generations are robbed of universes. When a poet dies, the world loses a piece of its soul.

You can find Refaat's book "Gaza Writes Back" in my gdrive folder of Palestinian literature. I don't know where the royalties will go now, but please also try and find it in a bookstore or library.

#refaat alareer #palestinian poetry #palestinian literature #gaza genocide #palestinian genocide #genocide joe #fuck joe biden #free gaza #free palestine #gaza writes back #us politics #us government #vajra chandrasekera #imani barbarin #hebh jamal #western imperialism #western hypocrisy #knee of huss #gaza news

[queer-book-character-tournament]

Character, book, and author names under the cut

Fetter- The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera

Xie Lian- Heaven Official's Blessing / Tian Guan Ci Fu by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu

Magnus Chase- Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard series by Rick Riordan

Benjamin/Benji Woodside- Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White

#Fetter #The Saint of Bright Doors #Vajra Chandrasekera #Xie Lian #Heaven Official's Blessing #Tian Guan Ci Fu #tgcf #hob #mxtx #Mo Xiang Tong Xiu #Magnus Chase #Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard #Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard series #mcga #pjo #percy jackson series #riordanverse #Rick Riordan #Benjamin Woodside #Benji Woodside #Hell Followed with us #Andrew Joseph White #lgbt books #polls #queer book character tournament 2.0

[wizardsvslesbians]

We go along despairing about the state of the publishing industry and bemoaning the lack of artistry and strangeness in modern SF and then in defiance of all logic someone drops a first novel like this.

#wizards vs lesbians #the saint of bright doors #vajra chandrasekera

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #16 – The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera

I grabbed this on a recommendation I now forget the specifics of, but which I am incredibly glad I listened to. Not a perfect book, but a beautiful one. It really does immerse you in a capital-w Weird setting in a way I haven’t gotten to enjoy in a while, and might the best in years at really weaving it in with a sense of the mundane and the bathetic. Pacing and character development and plot are a little all over the place, but still a great read.

The story follows Fetter, the only child of the Perfect and Kind, anointed messiah of the Path Above. His mother tears his shadow off of him at birth, and forever after he must choose to remain tethered to the earth and not float away into infinity. He is raised from birth as a tool to take vengeance on his father by committing each of his five unforgivable sins – culminating, of course, in holy patricide. His childhood is spent in indoctrination and murders – and oh, he’s also the only one he knows who can see the monstrous devils who share the world with humanity.

So anyway, all that gives him a lot to talk about in therapy.

The actual book follows Fetters’ life as an aimless young adult in the city of Luriat, with its layers of impenetrable government and byzantine system of castes and races inherited from successive colonizers, its regular pogroms and plagues, and its tendency for any doors left closed and unwatched for too long to instantaneously become permanently shut portals to Somewhere. Over the course of the book, he is dragged into a revolutionary conspiracy, learns his father is coming to the city, learns deep metaphysical secrets, is a pretty terrible boyfriend, becomes a suicide bomber, and learns to fly.

To start with the negative, the pacing of the plot is...okay, maybe not bad, but it’s really not trying for the things I’d expect it to. A whole act of the narrative is spent meandering through an absurd purgatory of refugee/prison/quarantine camps Fetter has been consigned to. Lovely writing, thematically important, does eat up a lot of page count which then leads to rest of the book being things happening very quickly one after the other with very little in the way of buildup or reflection. Time is enjoyably spent just detailing the experience of Fetter’s day to day life, but much of the supporting cast feel more like plot (or thematic) devices than characters. The book ends with the protagonist loudly reciting the big lesson he’s learned from the events of the book. So yeah, less than perfect book. Still, I found all the sins very easy to forgive.

As mentioned, this was the first fantasy book I’ve read in a while that felt properly fantastical, like it was created from first principles rather than being the latest in a hoary old lineage stretching back generations. Which might be complete bullshit, I don’t know – not like I’ve read a great deal of other South Asian fantasy to compare it to – but it worked for me. A big part of which is how very modern it is. This is a secondary world with prophets and plague-bearing anti-gods, forgotten timelines whose ghosts leak into the world, and a whole plethora of almost- and not-quite- messiahs. And also one with cellphones and UN-administered refugee camps, labyrinthine bureaucratic politics and scandals over inappropriate allocation of imported medical devices. It all feels like a reflection of the present and its own concerns rather than the thousandth-generation pastiche much of the genre does, I suppose – which is something I really did appreciate.

The world of the book – or, at least, the little slice of it the story is concerned with. There’s clearly grander and stranger things happening off in the distance – is one intensely concerned with caste and class, race and religion and breeding. Luriat is weighed down with the architecture and high culture of successive waves of colonialism, and its elites organize and govern the population according to a syncretic mix of all of their ideological castoffs. Politics – and in particular the use of plague and quarantine on one hand and sectarian pogroms on the other to control the populace – is pretty key to the whole book. It’s also just about entirely beyond Fetter. Not that he’s dumb, just that he’s apolitical, in the sense of treating government like an inexorable and inevitable fact of life to be worked with/around or avoided, not something you can understand or change. Which makes for fun reading as there’s clearly a whole Les Mis thing happening like 0.5 degrees to the left of the book’s plot.

Anyway, I’m still sad Pipra didn’t get more screentime, and the whole ending feels almost comically rushed, but absolutely a worthwhile read.

#book review #the saint of bright doors #vajra chandrasekera #sff

[bread-lowph]

idk i think about this a lot

#the saint of bright doors #vajra chandrasekera #sff #literature #book quotes #necropolitics

[flyleafbooks]

SO excited to be starting the summer with amazing reads from @tordotcompub @torbooks !!!

#ulterior motive is to post the tote bag I hand dyed this weekend #mod j #books #emily tesh #martha wells #emma mieko candon #vajra chandrasekera #s.l. huang #torbooks

[adamantine]

Some good news!

#the saint of bright doors #vajra chandrasekera

[dinios-kol]

"I wanted to say that I feel this place on me like a weight on the back of my neck, like ghosts at my hand and behind my eyes. I wanted to write what it feels like to be a fragile, damaged human body gasping for breath in the chin-high floods of politics and histories, of love and lore and family. I wanted to see histories twisted, the mythic mangled, devils made visible."

-Vajra Chandrasekera, in a letter to booksellers for The Saint of Bright Doors

#this is one of those quotes that just. haunts forever #usually these 'letters to booksellers' are from an editor who r like 'this is good!' #but this one. this is one letter i'll be keeping with me forever #vajra chandrasekera #oh also - READ SAINT OF BRIGHT DOORS #tordotcom

[booksandchainmail]

Even with all this practice, Fetter cannot say if his skill in combat or the use of weapons improves. He eventually becomes accustomed to violence, which, he supposes, was the point in the first place. One day Mother-of-Glory pronounces him ready for the real thing. She packs him a lunch and gives him some money and a knife and a blessing, the words impatient and mumbled because she doesn’t believe in blessings, not even her own. Such things are his father’s territory. “Remember, son,” Mother-of-Glory says, compensating with pomposity for her deficits of piety or affection. “The only way to change the world is through intentional, directed violence.” And Fetter goes out into the world, armed and dangerous and thirteen.

- The Saint of Bright Doors, by Vajra Chandrasekera

#the saint of bright doors #vajra chandrasekera

[ninsiana0]

Read THE SAINT OF BRIGHT DOORS by Vajra Chandrasekera if you love strange & terrible things, scars, chaotic cities, laying down your parents' trauma, support groups, the unchosen ones, wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff, bright colors, cults, devils & the multiple versions of self.

I received a copy of this book for review.

#The Saint of Bright Doors #Vajra Chandrasekera #Read This If #bookrecs #book recommendations #book reviews #book reviewer #readers on tumblr #readersoftumblr #readmore #book covers #books #book #read #reader #bookworm #bibliophile #netgalley #advance copy

[torpublishinggroup]

Fetter was raised to kill, honed as a knife to cut down his sainted father. This gave him plenty to talk about in therapy.

WHAT’S IT ABOUT

As a child, Fetter walked among invisible powers: devils and anti-gods that mock the mortal form. He learned a lethal catechism, lost his shadow, and gained a habit for secrecy. After a blood-soaked childhood, Fetter escaped his rural hometown for the big city, and fell into a broader world where divine destinies are a dime a dozen.

Everything in Luriat is more than it seems. Group therapy is recruitment for a revolutionary cadre. Junk email hints at the arrival of a god. Every door is laden with potential, and once closed may never open again. The city is scattered with Bright Doors, looming portals through which a cold wind blows. In this unknowable metropolis, Fetter will discover what kind of man he is, and his discovery will rewrite the world.

The Saint of Bright Doors sets the high drama of divine revolutionaries and transcendent cults against the mundane struggles of modern life, resulting in a novel both revelatory and resonant.

#vajra chandrasekera #the saint of bright doors #spec fic #south asian sff #tbr #booklr #science fiction #new books #tordotcom publishing

[honesthypocrite]

Just finished this wonderful book, The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera . Very interesting, combining a modern world, but not this one, with many competing religions and magic. The feeling of the numinous behind the world we see, a mission to be accomplished or refused, backlit by the mundane but life or death consequences of politics directly relevant to our day and age make a compelling combination.

#vajra chandrasekera #the saint of bright doors #fiction #fantasy #book

[hawkwinglb]

64. Worldbuilding: An Aesthetic of Coherence?

In this post: An Aesthetic of Coherence? Thinking about Vajra Chandrasekera’s “The Lone and Level Sands.” Reviews at Reactor Magazine (the former Tor.com) An Aesthetic of Coherence? I haven’t yet read The Saint of Bright Doors, but I’ve been reading some of Vajra Chandrasekera’s essays with great interest. Chandrasekera is a deft writer and a vivid essayist, and frequently directs a…

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#books #Faebound #fantasy #history #Lilith Saintcrow #Reactor #Saara El-Arifi #Tor.com #Vajra Chandrasekera

[nzbookwyrm]

June 2024

#rakesfall #vajra chandrasekera #book covers

[literary-illuminati]

going for double damage (inbox +1 AND another suggestion for the tbr). I think you might like The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera. It's a very odd fantasy book with gorgeously written prose about revolution and cults and the ol' imperialisms. Probably one of the best books on a craft and originality level I've read this year.

Oh, and while I'm here, unrecommending The Splinter in the Sky by Kemi Ashing-Giwa. It's covering a lot of the same ground as Memory Called Empire (excellent), and I'd say it's better at depicting the realities of cultural imperialism-- but also. It's also just not as good on a basic prose/craft level and it has a bad case of Surely We Can Solve This Systemic Issue Forever If We Just Kill This One Guy. Deeply frustrating since the premise has a lot of potential.

Surely We Can Solve This Systemic Issue Forever If We Just Kill This One Guy

Yeah this is increasingly becoming, well, not a dealbreaker, but at least a major demerit in books trying to deal with actual issues for me. (At the very least, if you're positing a load-bearing Pope Of Racism, the rest of the setting better be stylized and surreal enough for it to fit).

Anyway I have no memory of hearing of this book before but I did apparently because it's already on my giant tbr list. Will move it up, anyway! Thanks for the rec!

#wearethekat #the saint of bright doors #Vajra Chandrasekera