A lyrical and visceral short story collection, The Body of the Thing unpicks the hierarchies that thrum under our relationships, from first loves and lusts to motherhood and miscarriages, from sexual awakenings to final confrontations with death. Traversing bougie neighbourhoods in Manhattan, sun-drenched piazzas in Italy, coastal Maine, and the bustle of London, these stories chase the fallout when women’s bodies are valued for their beauty and youth, dismissed and discarded when ill, or made useful as parents and caregivers. Fluid, sensual, and fearless, The Body of the Thing is about looking at and living in the female body – and all of its complicated realities and wonders.
Karishma Jobanputra is a British Indian writer who has lived in London and New York and is a graduate of Columbia University’s MFA Fiction programme. Listed for the Brick Lane Short Story Prize 2024 and for the Disquiet Literary Prize for Fiction in 2021 and 2023, she was selected as the winner of the Eilean Shona Writing Workshop scholarship in 2021, where she returned to teach in 2023. Her work has been published in No Tokens Journal, The Rumpus, Wildness Journal, and Columbia Journal, amongst other places.
Read: This Constant Living by Karishma Jobanputra, Real Wildness
First lines: Newton’s third law of motion: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. But this can, of course, result in stillness. A book on a shelf, a menu resting on a table. Downward weight, upward push. Like neither action nor reaction is happening at all.