books – Mimi Mondal

No longer posting here! Find me on Patreon.

It’s bittersweet to leave this blog, which I’ve had since my college days, but the last time I posted here was five years ago. I spend less time online now than I did in the years past, but I do post about my writing and events, just not so much here. With the recent implosion of social media (read “Twitter”) all my writer and reader friends have scattered to various corners of the Internet. Some have become more active with email newsletters.

If you want the latest on my writing and events, right now the best option seems to be my Patreon. I appreciate every donation and I will be sharing more materials for each reward tier, but did you know you can also subscribe for free to a Patreon creator account? I’ll post my new publications and event details for all my Patreon subscribers, so that will function like a small newsletter until/unless I find a more suitable medium.

Tasveer South Asian Litfest is on! My first panel tomorrow!

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The Tasveer South Asian Litfest, for which I worked as a curator and consultant the last few months, has just started, and you can watch it from anywhere in the world with a free registration. please please come register (and attend) if you can!

This is a six-day-long event with a panel every evening during the weekdays, and a few more during the afternoon on the weekend. The panel I am moderating called Dalitness in Diaspora takes place tomorrow evening, and on Saturday at noon I’m one of the panelists on Plural Worlds, Plural Futures: South Asian Speculative Fiction. Following my panel on Saturday is The World that Belongs to Us: Queer Poetry from South Asia, which I partly helped curate with some of my favourite diasporic poets. And on Sunday morning there is Not Just ABCD: A New Generation in Young Adult and Children’s Literature, which I didn’t curate myself but I came up with the excellent punny title. (What? It is excellent, right?)

Tasveer is physically located in Seattle, so the time on the event posters is all for the West Coast. Dalitness in diaspora is at 9 pm in New York for me tomorrow, so in India it would be 6:30 am on Friday morning. And then, on Saturday afternoon Plural Worlds, Plural Futures will be at 3 p.m. in New York, and in India it will be at 12:30 am, right after midnight into Sunday, when many of you are possibly awake?

As a guest author or panelist I don’t often worry about how many people end up attending an event besides sharing it on my social media, but as a curator for the first time I feel like I should be putting more heart into it. My main curation for this festival was the Dalitness in Diaspora panel, which features Yashica Dutt, Suraj Yengde, Toral Gajarawala and John Boopalan, authors whose works I’ve admired and whom I am really excited to bring together in conversation. It is also an especially momentous panel because conversations on Dalit writing don’t usually happen in the South Asian diaspora. Tasveer may just be the first literary festival doing it, and it’s really super high time that it starts, and not only among the Dalits ourselves. I’ll be really glad if you can come to listen, meet these wonderfully erudite and thoughtful authors, and participate in the conversation tomorrow.

Looking forward to an amazing week of South Asian diasporic literature, intellectualism, identities, and imaginations!

Up for the 2020 shinies! Jinni, trapeze master, devadasi, printer’s devil, tiger-man & assorted bestitudes!

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The hoary winds of winter are here, as are the reminders for all the wonderful and numerous works great science fiction and fantasy that were published round the year. As always, I would love for you to read my two most recent stories, always mainly for your entertainment and also if you’re voting for the awards.

As always, especially if you’re a new and/or international SFF reader (hi, my friends from India!), I would love for you to consider voting for the awards if you’re able. You don’t need to have an expert’s opinion on all the award categories; not all voters do, and the awards benefit from the opinions of a wider range of readers. The Locus Awards which open for voting in February are a free online vote, and the Hugo Awards can be voted for online with the purchase of a Supporting Membership to the award year’s WorldCon (which is different every year, but for 2020 it’s ConZealand). I’ll be really glad if you take some time to familiarize yourself with these processes and participate in them, because your presence in the fandom makes me feel more visible. Voting for my works is absolutely optional to this. If you’d like a handy and frankly awesome list of the books by other authors that I enjoyed this year, don’t forget to scroll down to the bottom of this post.

And now for these two:

**His Footsteps, Through Darkness and Light (7521 words, Tor.com)**

Eligible for: Novelette at the Hugo, Nebula, Locus Awards; Short story (no separate novelette category) for the World Fantasy Awards

If you’ve only ever read one story by me, you’ve probably read “His Footsteps, Through Darkness and Light.” I received my first ever royalty statement for this novelette! A professor in Pakistan is teaching it in her graduate class! Someone very kindly put it on the Nebula suggested reading list months before I even wrote an award eligibility post! More cool news that’s currently TBA but soon, very soon!

And, uh, look, we all know that drawing isn’t my strongest suit but I love these boys, ok? Both Binu and Shehzad were characters in my other stories before. They’ve come a long way, grown up in ways I didn’t expect and taken me by surprise.

Karen Burnham’s review in Locus Magazine

Continue reading “Up for the 2020 shinies! Jinni, trapeze master, devadasi, printer’s devil, tiger-man & assorted bestitudes!” →

The Berlin schedule is out!!! (September 13, 14, 15)

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The program book for the Internationales Literaturfestival Berlin is finally out. The tickets are booked. The Schengen is cooling fresh off the press. A new story on Artificial Intelligence, possibly called “Twenty-Nine Days Before Remaking The World,” is getting its finishing touches even as we type. Outfits and sightseeing will be planned soon.

It’s a long festival of eleven days, with full-day programming on the weekends and only evening programming during the weekdays. You can search for my name on the program, or you can scroll right down to p. 51 and 52, in the Science and the Humanities section. Or better, I can write them out here.

13 September 2019, Friday, 8 pm

A Science Fiction Tribute to AI, with Catherine Dufour, Simon Ings, Mimi Mondal and Malka Older, moderated by Maya Indira Ganesh

14 September 2019, Saturday, 5 pm

Of Talkative Bots and AI Gods, with Catherine Dufour, Mimi Mondal and Sacha Alanoca; moderated by Maya Indira Ganesh (This is where you can hear the new story!!!)

15 September 2019, Sunday, 12 pm

Bionic Labs, Robot Bees and Cyborgs, with Karen Lord, Mimi Mondal, Tim Landgraf and Jan Müggenburg, moderated by Michelle Christensen

All three of my events are free to attend, though some of the other programs at the festival have tickets. All three are held at HAU2 at the Hebbel am Ufer in Kreuzberg, with the address Hallesches Ufer 32, 10963 Berlin. Yes, I know, I’m writing all this down in detail so that I can quickly copy-paste them into my GPS in case I get lost in the city. The only time I’ve been to Berlin before was an all-night layover five years ago. This is going to be fun!

DC! New York! Berlin! ChengDu! (Is it a bird? Is it a plane?)

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I’m never sure how these things happen, but it turns out I have a few events in the upcoming days, if you want to come and see me read a story or try (and often fail, tbh) to say clever things. I should’ve written this post a month ago and included Readercon in Quincy, MA, but that’s going to be for the next year now.

So if you’re in any of the abovementioned excellent cities, I’ll really love it if you came over and said hello and partook of the tomfoolery. Besides New York I’ve never been to any of those places, so dining recommendations afterwards are also welcome. Here are the rest of the deets:

August 3 in Washington, DC!

7:30 pm to 8 pm at the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, Eaton DC Crystal Room (Second Floor), you can listen to a new story by me and an open mic/music by the artist collective POstb1nary, if you get tired of listening to me. This is curated by Maya Acharya as a part of the 2019 Asian American Literature Festival (August 2–4), and the full festival schedule is here.

August 8 in New York, NY!

7 pm to 9 pm at the Erewhon Literary Salon, I’ll be reading a new story along with fellow SFF writer and Brooklyn Speculative Fiction Writers organizer Rob Cameron. Curated by Liz Gorinsky for Erewhon Books. RSVP on their Facebook/Twitter event closer to the date for the door address, although it’s in midtown.

September 13–15 in Berlin, Germany!

Internationales Literaturfestival Berlin, at which I have three events. Exact times and co-panelists TBA, but it’s a 10-day-long festival (September 11 to 21), and if you’re in Berlin it may be fun to attend the rest of the day as well!

September 13: Tribute to classic SFF writers
September 14: Reading from a new story
September 15: Panel discussion on Artificial Intelligence

November 22–24 in ChengDu, China!

International Science Fiction Conference. Everything else about this one is so far TBA, but if I happen to know anyone in ChengDu (or you happen to know who I am!) you may as well come over for the entire convention. I will also appreciate company for panda-spotting and amazing-but-non-spicy-food-spotting, and everyone who knows more Mandarin than I do, which is approximately 8 billion people in the world.