Jay Shelat
@jshelat1
PhD. Assistant Professor of English at Ursinus College. Contemporary Literature. Writing a book about the War on Terror and domesticity. I know hundreds of Bollywood songs by heart. he/him. Views are my own.
Rereading PERSEPOLIS for my Graphic Narratives class and I feel like I could spend a whole day on this panel and dialectic materialism alone.
Friends! @dissentum.bsky.social and I are hosting a book club with @southlits.bsky.social. We’re reading Dorothy Tse’s (very short!) novella CITY LIKE WATER! It’s on July 31st @ 2pm EST! Come through!
Rereading @nsousanis.bsky.social’s UNFLATTENING for my graphic narratives class and I’m always so so so so so so awestruck by its beauty and wisdom. Students love it too!
Book VII of Paradise Lost—when God creates Earth—made me cry. It’s astonishingly beautiful poetry.
Happy Poolside Wednesday with Andrew Sean Greer’s newest novel, Villa Coco. I love Greer’s work, especially Less and Less Is Lost, which I find hilarious and beautiful. I anticipate the same from this novel too!
Next up on the reading docket is Laura Esquirel’s LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE! I studied Spanish throughout high school and minored in it in college, and somehow I skipped reading this one. It’ll be the last “fun read” before I jump back into writing.
My friends and I had a PowerPoint night where we explained what our jobs are. Very fun! Everyone was surprised that research and teaching are just part of a professor’s job. Someone asked me if i get paid for service lolol
Some recent reads as I finished up writing some stuff! The standouts here are -Ethan Rutherford’s NORTH SUN, -Sarah Winman’s TIN MAN, -Karan Mahajan’s THE COMPLEX, -Nina McConigley’s HOW TO COMMIT A POSTCOLONIAL MURDER -Anthony Shapland’s A ROOM ABOVE A SHOP -Diamond Forde’s THE BOOK OF ALICE
Big family wedding this weekend and the sunset last night was so great that I turned pink
Yall, NORTH SUN, OR THE VOYAGE OF THE WHALESHIP ESTHER by Ethan Rutherford is so astonishingly good. I’ve been devouring it. It’s like if Hayao Miyazaki wrote MOBY DICK.
If you’re around at MELUS in Austin this weekend, come to the panel @emmywaldman.bsky.social and I put together. I’m talking about N.K. Jemisin’s novel The City We Became. The paper is from the fifth chapter of my book!
Asha Bhosle was a powerhouse. She shaped my love for Bollywood and my understanding of what genre means. I was lucky enough to be in the front row of her concert back in 2015, when she was 81. She had the entire Fox Theater in ATL on their feet dancing and swaying. She was magnificent.
Yesterday was my birthday! That’s right! I’m a clown specially because I was born on April Fools Day. It was a lovely day with good friends and good food. And I finally finished a draft of the article I’ve been working on!
Excited that after sabbatical I’m teaching some cool classes in the Fall! I always teach Methods, and I’m stoked to teach graphic narratives and a senior seminar on my book, Domestic Denial, again. I’m esp excited to teach a class on Moby Dick. Couldn’t sleep last night so I made these posters.
Charles after hanging out with Anthony: “I repeated to myself, Anthony’s words, catching his accent, soundlessly, and the stress and cadence of his speech, while under the closed lips, I saw his pale, candlelit face as it had fronted me across the dinner table.”
The snow is coming down and I’m curled up on the couch reading Brideshead Revisited for the first time. 😌
My book is thiiiiiiiiiis close to being done! Prepping for formatting was a lot more work than I anticipated. Now I just gotta add a few bits and bobs to the intro and epilogue and finish the author questionnaire 😬👌🏾
I finished The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai. It’s resplendent fiction. Just so beautifully, intelligently rendered! I highly recommend it!
Hello from India! I’m visiting for the first time in 22 years and it’s been so fun!
Hello from 35,000 feet in the air where I’m enraptured by Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. Good thing I can’t sleep on planes, because it gives me time to just pop in headphones and enjoy a lovely, big book.
This was…fine? Some funny moments but the comedy of errors between Dromio and Antipholous got annoying. Four more Billy Shakes plays left to read!
For the last like decade, I’ve started the new year with a Shakespeare play I’ve never read. This year it’s The Comedy of Errors!
The sales guy for this set of pots and pans looked at me and said, “You can make your chai, biryani, and dosa”