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Sugar, Smoke, Song is a collection of ten linked stories set in the Bronx, California, India, and Brazil. Following the secrets and passions of young women, these stories and their narrators cross genres and rules to arrive at unforeseen lives. A subway rider remembers enacting the gods with her estranged twin, a concert usher discovers her tango-dancing boyfriend’s lover, and a literacy worker confesses the gambles she and others have lost through the bluesy singers she admires. Told through semi-experimental play with nonlinear plots, plural narrators, and hybrid prose, these stories embody the experiences of Asian American women carrying histories both unseen and cyclically lived.
"The fire and guts of this material made a helix with the poetics and heart of the story. I was left breathless several times. This writer is on the cusp of inventing a signature language meant for telling this particular story." —Lidia Yuknavitch, Red Hen Press Women’s Prose Prize judge 2018
"This novel is a gorgeous thunder swirl of dance and music, failure and friendship. I love how the places—India, New York, San Francisco, and beyond—press out through the narrative alongside Hindu, American, and family mythologies. I love the rhythms in it, the scatter and the necessity." —Ramona Ausubel, author of Awayland
"Each story contains a fully realized world, often revealed in elliptical pieces, and the collection coheres beautifully. This is a stunner."—Publishers Weekly
"Her stories wear the garb of long prose poems evoking autofiction which collapses high and low. Her prose stays clear of the deceptively simple gimmickry and also avoids verbosity. Her writing instead educes Toni Morrison at times, perhaps even Toomer’s Cane, and black radical poetry, from modernism to experimental, and though Rajbanshi’s prose is often rooted in realism, she subverts it by her signature manipulation of syntax and register." —Moazzam Sheikh, The Nonconformist Magazine
"Sensuous and surprising, Sugar, Smoke, Song presents variations on a theme of Assamese American women's identities, including hardship with a dash of hope." — Suzanne Kamata, Foreword Reviews
"Sensuous and surprising, Sugar, Smoke, Song presents variations on a theme of Assamese American women's identities, including hardship with a dash of hope." —Suzanne Kamata, Foreword Reviews