Padma Viswanathan
Author of
The Charterhouse of Padma (David R. Godine, 2024)
Like Every Form of Love (7.13 Books, 2024; Random House Canada, 2023)
The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (Soft Skull, 2015; Random House Canada 2014)
The Toss of a Lemon (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008)
Padma Viswanathan is the author of two novels: The Toss of a Lemon (2008), published in eight countries, a bestseller in three, and shortlisted for the Pen Center USA Fiction Prize among others, and The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (2014), also an international bestseller and a finalist for Canada’s Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her memoir, Like Every Form of Love, was published by Random House Candada and is forthcoming from 7.13 Books. Viswanathan’s fiction, essays and translations have been published in Granta, The Paris Review, LitHub, Brick, Asymptote and elsewhere. Her translation of the novel São Bernardo, by Brazilian writer Graciliano Ramos, was published in 2020 by the New York Review Books, and she will be co-editor, with Daniel Hahn, of the Penguin Book of Brazilian Short Stories. She has served as fiction faculty at the Banff Center, the Vermont Studio Center, Kundiman, the Bread Loaf Conferences, and others. Recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Canada Council for the Arts, Viswanathan is a professor of fiction at the University of Arkansas and Founding Director of the Arkansas International Writer-at-Risk Residency Program. She divides her time between Fayetteville, AR and Montreal.
Books by Padma
The Charterhouse of Padma (David R. Godine, 2024)
Two South Asian professors, both named P, unearth shocking secrets about the men they love and question the lives they chose. P is writing obsessively about her favorite color: chartreuse. She’s a translator and professor, married to Mac, a professional feminist too slick for his own good. As the COVID lockdown commences, she discovers a secret about him, one that upends her understanding of their relationship and their marriage. In the gulf of their widening estrangement, P imagines a double, someone very like herself but less lonely, more independent, more angry, more maternal, more fun…Now we meet another “P”: a novelist, also writing about chartreuse. She’s married to a successful poet and translator called Mat. It’s her second marriage—the first fell apart when she discovered a secret about her then-husband. This P is abraded, exhausted, and enraged: by racial microaggressions, by structural obstacles, by the ways her husband’s reaction to her own overdue career success is challenging their marriage. Granted stillness by the pandemic, though, this P rediscovers joy and hope in her relationship. Eventually, each woman is led by her essay to the Chartreuse Mountains, the region made famous by the monks and their secret elixir.
The Charterhouse of Padma is full of delicious secrets, revelations, and sharply observed truths about what is to be brown, a woman, a wife, a mother, and an artist. Exhilarating, electrifying, charged with incisive intellect and humor, this is a novel for anyone who ever wondered how, and if, they ever chose the thing they love.
Like Every Form of Love: A Memoir of Friendship and True Crime (Random House Canada, 2023)
Padma was staying on a houseboat on Vancouver Island when she struck up a friendship with a warm-hearted, working-class queer man named Phillip. Their lives were so different it seemed unlikely to Padma that their relationship would last after she returned to her usual life. But, that week, Phillip told her a story from his childhood that kept them connected for more than twenty years.
Phillip was the son of a severe, abusive man named Harvey, a miner, farmer and communist. After Phillip’s mother left the family, Harvey advertised for a housekeeper-with-benefits. And so Del, the most glamorous and loving of stepmothers, stepped into Phillip’s life. Del had hung out with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in Mexico City before the Cuban revolution; she was also a convicted bank robber who had violated her parole and was suspected in her ex-husband’s murder. Phillip had long since lost track of Del, but when Padma said she’d like to write about her and about his own young life, he eagerly agreed. Quickly, though, Padma’s research uncovered hidden truths about these larger-than-real-life characters. Watching the effects on Phillip as these secrets, evasions and traumas came to light, she increasingly feared that when it came to the book or the friendship, only one of them would get out of this process alive.
In this unforgettable memoir, Padma reflects on the joys and frictions of this strange journey with grace, humor and poetry, including original readings of Hans Christian Andersen fairytales and other stories that beautifully echo her characters’ adventures and her own. Like Every Form of Love is that rare thing: an irresistible literary page-turner that twists and turns, delivering powerful revelations, right to the very end.
São Bernardo (New York Review Books Classics, 2020)
A masterwork about backcountry life by one of Brazil’s most celebrated novelists.
Paulo Honório is a sometime field hand who has kicked and clawed and schemed his way to prosperity, becoming master of the decrepit estate São Bernardo, where once upon a time he toiled. He is ruthless in his exploitation of his fellow man, but when he makes a match with a fine young woman, he is surprised to discover that this latest acquisition, as he sees it, may be somewhat harder to handle. It is in Paulo Honório’s own rough-hewn voice that the great Brazilian writer Graciliano Ramos, often compared to William Faulkner, tells this gritty and dryly funny story of triumph and comeuppance, a tour de force of the writer’s art that is beautifully captured in Padma Viswanathan’s new translation.
PRAISE
"Viswanathan has made a precious contribution to the body of English-language literature, adding to it the vibrant voice of one [of] the most important figures of 20th-century Brazilian letters.” —Arthur Ivan Bravo, The Los Angeles Review of Books
"Viswanathan has...a brilliant ear for irony and double-entendres... an illuminating interpretation of the novel in its own right."—Miguel Conde, Words Without Borders
The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (Soft Skull Press, 2015)
A book of post-9/11 life, The Ever After demonstrates that violent politics are all-too-often homegrown in North America but ignored at our peril.
In 2004, almost 20 years after the fatal bombing of Air India Flight 182 from Vancouver, two suspects are—finally—on trial for the crime. Ashwin Rao, an Indian psychologist trained in North America, comes back to do a “study of comparative grief,” interviewing people who lost loved one in the attack. What he neglects to mention is that he, too, had family members who died on the plane. Then, to his delight and fear, he becomes embroiled in the lives of one family that remains unable to escape the undertow of the tragedy. As Ashwin finds himself less and less capable of providing the objective advice this particular family seeks, his surprising emotional connection to them pushes him to face his own losses. The Ever After of Ashwin Rao imagines the lasting emotional and political consequences of a real-life act of terror, confronting what we might learn to live with and what we can live without.
PRAISE
"The best kind of political novel: the kind that doesn’t force you to constantly notice it’s a political novel…"—The Globe and Mail
“…brilliant. For a story about loss, this novel has an upbeat, almost exhilarating tempo.”—Westerly Magazine
"Viswanathan’s intricate and empathetic tale deftly reveals the cultural rifts of immigration, post-9/11 politics, and conflicts of faith exposed by this real-world tragedy and its lasting reverberations."—Booklist
The Toss of a Lemon (Harpervia, 2008)
Inspired by her family history, Padma Viswanathan brings us deep inside the private lives of a Brahmin family as India moves through sixty years of intense social and political change.
Sivakami is married to an astrologer and village healer whose horoscope foretells an early death – depending on how the stars align when their children are born. All is safe with their daughter’s birth, but their second child, a son named Vairum, fulfills the prophecy: by eighteen, Sivakami is a widow with two young children. According to the dictates of her caste, her head is shaved and she must don the widow’s white sari. From dawn to dusk, she is not allowed to contaminate herself with human touch, not even to comfort her small children. Sivakami dutifully follows custom, except for one defiant act: she moves back to her dead husband’s house, where she can raise her children independently and give her son a secular education. There, her servant Muchami, a closeted gay man who is bound by a different caste’s rules, becomes her public face. Their singular relationship holds three generations of the family together through the turbulent first half of the twentieth century, as India endures great social and political change. But as time passes, the family changes, too; Sivakami’s son will question the strictures of the very beliefs that his mother has scrupulously upheld. While her choice ensures that Vairum fulfills his promise in a modernizing India, it also sets Sivakami on a collision course with him. Vairum, fatherless in childhood, childless as an adult, rejects the caste identity that is his mother’s mainstay, twisting their fates in fascinating and unbearable ways.
PRAISE
“Altogether a pleasure.” —Kirkus (starred)
“She makes a vanished world feel completely authentic. Superbly done.”—Booklist
“Padma Viswanathan has real talent.” —The New York Times
“Dazzling… [A]n important work of historical fiction. Highly recommended.”—Library Journal (starred)