BLISS MOUNTAIN by Aashish Kaul

Like Joyce and Virginia Woolf, and their French modernist contemporary Marcel Proust, Kaul’s fiction is animated by epiphanies, those heightened moments of poetic perception or spiritual insight that pulse through and transform daily life. The writing is keenly attuned to the ways in which the present returns echoes or reminders of the close as well as more distantly-lived past. And always, it is a present and a past steeped in literature and the world of ideas.

–Jacqueline Kolosov, author of Modigliani’s Muse  and Memory of Blue

A multinational tale set in New York, London, Sydney, Kashmir, Bliss Mountain attends to the full context of place that includes history, architectural movements, and geologic time. Settings range from Manhattan’s modernist skyscrapers sitting atop shifts in the earth’s mantle to the Himalayan mountains standing steady above human drama. This capacious perspective engages the simultaneous largeness and smallness of human experience and offers in fiction what Scott Russell Sanders has described as a hallmark of the essay form: “a record, on paper, of the individual mind at work and play.” The novel is reminiscent of the writings of W.G. Sebald, Carole Maso, and Jeannette Winterson, for whom “character” is often less about individual histories and contexts than about shifting perspectives and tensions between interior and exterior realities. Kaul’s attention to the preoccupations of family, grief, and how we carry loss forward in life offers a pleasurable and moving read.

–Michele Morano, author of Like Love and Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain