S.J. Sindu

From the award-winning author of Marriage of a Thousand Lies comes a brilliantly written, globe-spanning novel about identity, faith, family, and sexuality. In Tamil Nadu, India, a boy is born with blue skin. His father sets up an ashram, and the family makes a living off of the pilgrims who seek the child’s blessings and miracles, believing young Kalki to be the tenth human incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu. In Kalki’s tenth year, he is confronted with three trials that will test his power and prove his divine status and, his father tells him, spread his fame worldwide. While he seems to pass them, Kalki begins to question his divinity. Over the next decade, his family unravels, and every relationship he relied on—father, mother, aunt, uncle, cousin—starts falling apart. Traveling from India to the underground rock scene of New York City, Blue-Skinned Gods explores ethnic, gender, and sexual identities, and spans continents and faiths, in an expansive and heartfelt look at the need for belief in our globally interconnected world.

In Tamil Nadu, India, a boy named Kalki, born with blue skin, believes he is the Hindu god Vishnu and that he can perform miracles. The truth, though, is much darker. As Kalki struggles to extract himself from under his father’s thumb, he must also reconcile with the idea that everything he’s ever been told might not be true. When his father drags him on a tour to America, Kalki seizes his chance to explore what life as an ordinary man might be like. Pulled between India and America, and his father’s web of control, Kalki must find his true place in the world.

DOMINANT GENES, the new hybrid collection from Stonewall Honor author and Lambda Literary Award finalist SJ Sindu, is equal parts power and astonishing beauty, tenderness and shimmering anger, poetry and lyric essays interwoven in a gorgeous exploration of family, heritage, and the construction of nonbinary and queer identities. "We learn our anger through osmosis," Sindu writes of the inherited rage of South Asian women, "or maybe it's in the breast milk, spreading through our veins long before we learn how to look only at the floor and walk without showing our ankles." There is hope in this collection, and the lead weight of expectation, and warm moments of empathy too. Thematically linked and stylistically nimble, Sindu's pieces play with the fragmentary nature of memory and identity, her speakers traversing with intelligence and compassion the complexities of mental health, love, and pressurized relationships with the people closest to us--those who love us intensely, even when they understand us the least. "In SJ Sindu's extraordinary new chapbook, her speaker lives in a *world in which women are punished for their pleasure, rage, and attempts at freedom. Exploring ancient stories, like the Mahabharata, as well as the speaker's own experiences growing up as a queer person in Sri Lanka and the US, DOMINANT GENES pulls at the strings that have stitched together our identities, making clear the social and cultural constraints that limit the freedom of women and gender nonconforming people. With tenderness and compassion toward her family, this smart, unflinching collection envisions a life for the speaker in which she does not inherit misogyny or her mother's idea of progress, a life in which she is the "seed in her own fruit."--Marianne Chan "SJ Sindu's new book DOMINANT GENES demonstrates the great pleasures and opportunities for surprise there are in hybrid forms. It's what I like best as a prose that understands the compression and vivid language of poetry and poetry that benefits greatly from the fiction maker's sense of scene and story. There's a wonderful lyric intensity here and beautifully nuanced interiority that I find deeply moving. A beautiful book written by an artist who moves fluidly between genres."--Erin Belieu ""I want to inherit your anger, and use your story to stitch my two selves back together,' writes SJ Sindu in this hybrid collection, poems and lyric essays weaving together the fragments of a life bifurcated across racial, familial, and queer identities. Blurring both genre and gender, Sindu questions descendancy, dominant genes something to unspool, silence something to unstitch, rage a means of survival. Yet as this collection undoes Sri Lankan matrilineal expectation, pulling at the faithless thread of what it means to inherit a story that does not serve you, it spins a richer myth of legacy and self, one that pierces like a needle."--Sarah Fawn Montgomery Poetry. Fiction.

Lucky and her husband, Krishna, are gay. They present an illusion of marital bliss to their conservative Sri Lankan–American families, while each dates on the side. It’s not ideal, but for Lucky, it seems to be working. She goes out dancing, she drinks a bit, she makes ends meet by doing digital art on commission. But when Lucky’s grandmother has a nasty fall, Lucky returns to her childhood home and unexpectedly reconnects with her former best friend and first lover, Nisha, who is preparing for her own arranged wedding with a man she’s never met. As the connection between the two women is rekindled, Lucky tries to save Nisha from entering a marriage based on a lie. But does Nisha really want to be saved? And after a decade’s worth of lying, can Lucky break free of her own circumstances and build a new life? Is she willing to walk away from all that she values about her parents and community to live in a new truth? As Lucky—an outsider no matter what choices she makes—is pushed to the breaking point, Marriage of a Thousand Lies offers a vivid exploration of a life lived at a complex intersection of race, sexuality, and nationality. The result is a profoundly American debut novel shot through with humor and loss, a story of love, family, and the truths that define us all.

A fierce, feminist, and fun middle grade fantasy graphic novel about a twelve-year-old Indian American girl named Shakti who must learn the power of her ancestral magic if she wants to save her family and town from a dangerous curse. Written by Stonewall Honor Book recipient and Lambda Literary Fellow SJ Sindu and illustrated by Nabi H. Ali.   Shakti is used to being the new girl at school. She and her two moms have moved more times than she can count. With her unborn baby brother on the way, Shakti hopes her family has found their forever home in Amherst, Massachusetts, and that she can finally make friends. On her first day of seventh grade, she meets Xi and they bond over their shared passion for manga (and pizza with mayo). But the three meanest girls in school—Harini, Emily, and Kelly (aka “HEK”)—are determined to make life miserable for Shakti and her new friends. When Shakti and Xi discover HEK casting spells in the woods, they fear what might happen to the other kids at school. Drawing on ancient Indian magic, Shakti seeks the aid of Durga Ma to stop HEK. But instead, Shakti accidentally conjures Kali Ma, the destroyer—Durga Ma's dangerous twin. Kali Ma punishes HEK by transforming them into monsters and curses the entire town. As more and more people begin to fall ill, including Shakti’s mom, will Shakti be able to harness her own strength, power, and empathy to save those she loves—and put an end to all the hate? 

A coming-of-age teen graphic novel that follows one girl’s journey to Sri Lanka to reconnect with her long-lost mother during the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. Ever since she turned sixteen, Nimmi has wanted to see her mother. Though she has a loving but overprotective father and a budding relationship, she yearns to travel to Sri Lanka to confront the mother who refused to leave the island during a war, not even for Nimmi’s sake. Her father is going back for the first time as a reporter on assignment, but he refuses to take her, deeming Sri Lanka too dangerous. But then Nimmi's mother appears to her in a dream, asking her to come find her, and Nimmi knows she must go. Her father is livid when he sees her at baggage claim, but by then it’s too late, and he reluctantly agrees to help Nimmi make contact with her mother. In Sri Lanka, Nimmi tags along with her father and his guide, past checkpoints and armed soldiers and increasing hints of the war that rages there. However, the day after Christmas, disaster strikes and a tsunami ravages the island. Stranded amid the devastation and destruction, can Nimmi reunite with her mother? Through her journey, Nimmi might just learn that the person she most needed to find was herself.

An uncanny and electric story collection from SJ Sindu, Lambda Literary finalist and Publishing Triangle Edmund White Debut Fiction Award–winning author of Blue-Skinned Gods In “Dark Academia and the Lesbian Masterdoc,” a millennial English professor facing mounting personal crises puts her energies into TikTok, but her newfound viral fame could wreck her already unstable life. In “Patriots'; Day,” a man trying to leave his marriage for the woman he loves finds himself caught up in larger currents of anti-Asian violence. In other stories, an array of loners and artists—a young poet haunted by the ghost of Oscar Wilde, a queer beer brewer, a boy with wings—struggle for connection and fulfillment in a world battered by the pandemic and reactionary politics. A daring writer with limitless range, SJ Sindu can depict shocking cruelty as readily as small moments of queer joy. The Goth House Experiment is a startling and very funny collection by one of America’s most exciting young voices.