Things We Found During the Autopsy

Things We Found During the Autopsy is South Indian writer Kuzhali Manickavel’s second collection of short fiction, in which she presents a dizzying array of apocalyptic visions and fractured childhood memories.

These stories contain the following: a dragon; angels; Indian culture; one Christmas story for children; no Indian culture whatsoever; men; poor people; voluntarily homeless youths; women; drugs; sex; Indian dads in cold foreign countries; vomit; boys; girl’s hostels; girls; future tense; the Tropicool Icy-Land Urban Indian Slum; ash, and the people who eat ash; authentic village life written from a privileged English-speaking perspective; homosexuals; white people; references to Rajinikanth; non-italicized Tamil words; whores; brain aneurysms; Western dance in South Indian women’s colleges; Pazhani; floods; shapeshifters; men named Kathir; minty-fresh non-cola cola; and wannabe Naxalites.

No one writes like Kuzhali Manickavel, and I do mean no one. These stories are not like anyone else’s. She’s terrific. If you’ve never read her fiction you’re in for a treat. – Lavie Tidhar

“A small book from a small publisher by a quiet writer with a fanatical following… Kuzhali Manickavel writes dense, dazzling prose that is thick with local grit and soars in a cosmopolitan wonderland. It’s heartbreaking and beautiful and also completely bonkers. You will find yourself flailing, whether reading her intermittent blog, her first book, or this one, her second, but rest assured that this is the best kind of bonkers; she is incapable of making anything less than perfect nonsense” – Achal Prabhala, Africa is a Country

“Yes, there are bicycle stealing penguins in this book… and shapeshifters, and a ‘whore-raft’ made out of the floating bodies of prostitutes… and immense economic disparity and fear and loneliness.Things We Found During the Autopsy is beautiful and bizarre, and always dark and deep and easy to lose yourself in” – Mahvesh Murad, Tor

“…That’s what these weird stories offer: a kind of companionship in this incomprehensible and terrifying world, and the possibility of finding hope and transformation exactly where meaning shatters” – Sofia Samatar, Strange Horizons