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How to Make Your Mother Cry

How to Make Your Mother Cry
Book cover for How to Make Your Mother Cry: Fictions by Sejal Shah. The text for the title and author are large and white. In the background is a painting showing the back of a small girl in the foreground. She is surrounded by tall grasses and bushes. In the far distance is a winding pathway leading to a house. At the bottom of the artwork: "An incredible cross-cultural manifesto of word and body." -- Lidia Yuknavitch author of national bestseller Thrust

Congratulations to Sejal Shah author of How to Make Your Mother Cry: Fictions published by West Virginia Press. Sejal is also a contributor to my anthology Disability Intimacy available now. You can check out this video of my first book event where I am in conversation with Sejal, Dr. Khadijah Queen, and Yomi Young. I'm stoked to offer 3 paperback copies to you lovely humans. Details below.

Book cover for How to Make Your Mother Cry: Fictions by Sejal Shah. The text for the title and author are large and white. In the background is a painting showing the back of a small girl in the foreground. She is surrounded by tall grasses and bushes. In the far distance is a winding pathway leading to a house. At the bottom of the artwork: "An incredible cross-cultural manifesto of word and body." -- Lidia Yuknavitch author of national bestseller Thrust

About the book

In the eleven linked short stories of How to Make Your Mother Cry, Sejal Shah builds a shrine gleaming with memory and myth. Keys, rocks, photographs, fairy tales, fables, and relics all add texture and meaning to an exploration of growing up and living as a diasporic Gujarati woman in a culture that excuses the behavior of men. Throughout, girls and women contend with the expectations, limitations, and challenges of becoming the heroine of one’s own life.
How to Make Your Mother Cry—Shah’s follow-up to her award-winning essay collection This Is One Way to Dance—continues the rich tradition of innovative feminist work by Claudia Rankine, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Maxine Hong Kingston. By braiding stories and images with fictional letters to a beloved English teacher, the collection defies traditional autofiction, epistolary, and short story conventions. These astonishing stories about friendship and love, resilience and survival establish Shah as an exciting new voice in contemporary fiction.
A smiling but somewhat serious-looking brown South Asian woman with wavy black hair past her shoulders and wearing silver hoop earrings and a black and white top. She is also wearing a light plum-colored lipstick and dark eyeliner.

About the author

Sejal Shah is a writer, interdisciplinary artist, and educator. Her debut story collection, How to Make Your Mother Cry: fictions, was published by West Virginia University Press in May . Sejal is also the author of the award-winning essay collection, This Is One Way to Dance (University of Georgia Press), chosen as a New York Times Sunday recommendation and NPR best book of 2020 and included on over thirty most-anticipated or best of lists in the Los Angeles Times, Electric Literature, The Millions, Ms. Magazine, The Rumpus, and Self. Her writing has appeared in Conjunctions, Guernica, The Guardian, and Lit Hub, among others. This Is One Way to Dance was a finalist for the CLMP Firecracker Award in nonfiction and received the Nautilus Books for a Better World Gold Award in Lyric Prose. Sejal’s groundbreaking Kenyon Review essay on invisible disability and neurodiversity, “Even If You Can’t See It,” was named a Longreads Editors’ Pick. She is the recipient of fellowships from Blue Mountain Center, the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop, Kundiman, Millay Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She was named a 2021 influential AAPI Leader by Good Morning America and ABC News. The daughter of immigrants from Kenya and India, Sejal lives in Rochester, New York on unceded Seneca and Haudenosaunee land. You can find her online at sejal-shah.com and @SejalShahWrites on Instagram and Twitter/X.

Details

1) Any disabled person in the US is eligible to receive a paperback. You do not need to disclose any details about your disability.

If you already received a book from one of my previous giveaways, please consider letting other people have a chance.

2) If you do not receive a reply that means the books have been claimed or you did not include all the required information.

3) Send an email to DisabilityVisibilityProject@gmail.com with 'Sejal Shah Giveaway’ in the title of the message. Do not reply to this post!!

4) Include the following information in your message:

  • First and last name
  • Mailing address

Please note: I will send this information along with your email address to the publisher. They are responsible for confirming your details and sending you the book. Please be patient!

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Published by:

Alice Wong

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