Welcome to my stop on the book blog tour for The Black-Marketer's Daughter by Suman Mallick. This blog tour was organized by Lone Star Book Blog Tours. On my stop, I have a guest post from the author. Be sure to check out the other stops on the tour for more content. Enjoy!
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Author: Suman Mallick
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Publication Date: October 13th 2020
Print Length: 166 pages
Genre: Contemporary Literary Fiction
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Zuleikha arrives in the US from Lahore, Pakistan, by marriage, having trained as a pianist without ever owning a real piano. Now she finally has one-a wedding present from her husband-but nevertheless finds it difficult to get used to her new role of a suburban middle-class housewife who has an abundance of time to play it.
Haunted by the imaginary worlds of the confiscated contraband books and movies that her father trafficked in to pay for her education and her dowry, and unable to reconcile them with the expectations of the real world of her present, she ends up as the central figure in a scandal that catapults her into the public eye and plays out in equal measures in the local news and in backroom deliberations, all fueled by winds of anti-Muslim hysteria.
The Black-Marketer's Daughter was a finalist for the Disquiet Open Borders Book Prize, and praised by the jury as a "complicated and compelling story" of our times, with two key cornerstones of the novel being the unsympathetic voice with which Mallick, almost objectively, relays catastrophic and deeply emotional events, and the unsparing eye with which he illuminates the different angles and conflicting interests at work in a complex situation. The cumulative effects, while deliberately unsettling to readers, nevertheless keeps them glued to the pages out of sheer curiosity about what will happen next.
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PRAISE:
"Mallick offers an impressively realistic depiction of a woman caught between tradition, family, and her own sense of empowerment." ~ Kirkus Reviews
"The Black-Marketer's Daughter is a key-hole look at a few things: a mismatched marriage, the plight of immigrants in the U.S., the emotional toll of culture shock, and the brutal way Muslim women are treated, especially by men within their own community. Titling it—defining the heroine by her relationship to a man rather than as a woman in her own right—suggests how deeply ingrained that inequality can be." ~ IndieReader Reviews
"The Black-Marketer's Daughter is the portrait of a woman who endures violence, intimidation, xenophobia and grief, and yet refuses to be called a victim. In this slender novel, Suman Mallick deftly navigates the funhouse maze of immigrant life in contemporary America—around each corner the possibility of a delight, a terror, or a distorted reflection of oneself." ~ Matthew Valentine, Winner, Montana Prize for Fiction; Lecturer, University of Texas at Austin
Suman Mallick received his MFA from Portland State University and is the assistant managing editor of the quarterly literary magazine Under the Gum Tree. He lives in Texas.
- How has being a Texan (or Texas) influenced your writing?
I have lived in Texas most of my life, despite only arriving here for the first time at eighteen on a college scholarship. Getting part of my education here, living and working here, raising a family here and now having most of my friends here, has meant taking an active interest and participating in the culture and politics of this place. So it was natural that the place would end up as the setting in my writing.
And while not everything that I write is based on a certain place, this particular story or at least the main thrust of it, could only happen in a place like this. The politics of abortion, for example, or of some ways in which the Muslim community has been singled out and poorly treated, directly inspired the themes I explore in this novel, which is why I chose Texas as the setting.
- What was the hardest part of writing The Black-Marketer’s Daughter? What did you enjoy most about writing this book?
The hardest part of writing this book was also the most enjoyable thing about it. As you can imagine, writing a novel from the point of view of a Pakistani woman who is a pianist and lives in America, encounters domestic violence, runs afoul of the mosque, and ends up in a legal quagmire, took a lot of research, because I’m neither Pakistani, nor a woman, nor a pianist, nor a lawyer, nor have experience with domestic violence, nor particularly religious.
But that process of learning, as hard as it was, was also, to me, the biggest reward of the exercise of writing this book. It forced me to set aside my preconceptions and really study and examine what I did not. And I was excited to do that and did not mind it a bit, because I really cared about the subject and the story. So after I finished writing the book, I genuinely felt like I did not care if it ever got published or not, because I had learned and grown so much just by writing it.
- Did you first experience rejections when submitting this manuscript for publication?
A lot. One thing I discovered about the publication industry is that for all the talk about how liberal and open-minded the people who work in it claim to be, the industry is actually just as risk-averse, if not more, than the banking sector which I deal with every day in my day job. Really, most agents are no different than brokers and most publishers are no different than banks when it comes to taking on clients and projects that don’t fit a particular cookie-cutter mold, are not guaranteed to appeal to a generic audience, and therefore will require a little more work than usual to get approved by a committee, even if that project has already been critically acclaimed. So that was somewhat disappointing, but ultimately not surprising, to come to term with this inbuilt bias in publishing.
Naturally, for me it was a long, slow journey. I started with the usual agent-querying process after completing my MFA and moving to Austin, and that takes time, as you know. The agents who expressed interest all ultimately passed, and they gave me reasons (that I’ll keep to myself) as to why they didn’t think they could pitch it to the big, New York based publishing houses. After a year of dancing that slow waltz, I started submitting to the small presses directly. Once the novel became a finalist for an award, there was a level of renewed interest, but I failed to really click with the first publishing house that liked the book, so I waited until my current publisher (Atmosphere Press) came along.
So from the start of the process until final acceptance, it took about three years, and then almost another year from then until now, when it is finally released. Which, I know, is not that unusual for a debut, although I must admit there were times in between when I felt like giving up on the process altogether and just writing for myself like I always have.
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CLICK TO VISIT THE LONE STAR LITERARY LIFE TOUR PAGE FOR DIRECT LINKS TO EACH POST ON THIS TOUR, UPDATED DAILY, or visit the blogs directly:
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1/6/21 |
Promo |
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1/7/21 |
Review |
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1/7/21 |
Guest Post |
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1/8/21 |
Review |
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1/8/21 |
Author Interview |
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1/9/21 |
Review |
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1/10/21 |
Excerpt |
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1/11/21 |
Author Interview |
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1/11/21 |
Review |
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1/12/21 |
Playlist |
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1/13/21 |
Review |
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1/13/21 |
Scrapbook Page |
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1/14/21 |
Author Interview |
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1/15/21 |
Review |
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1/15/21 |
Review |
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