reviews and blurbs
"Dysfunction fights hard to make semblance of a nonfunctional world. The characters are as broken as the tattered clockworks around them that force them into their grinding place. The ebb of their longing is stemmed by factors outside of their control which makes at times for a difficult read with its authentic stories that expose the bitter hollows of living. Even survival sometimes eludes them and it's the struggle for identity that gives them grease for their creaky, existential chains that disturbingly lack answers. And function."
-- HTML Giant, Spring 2013
"The stories are most successful when they are at their darkest, displaying allegorical brilliance on the scale of a Sanskrit epic."
-- Publishers Weekly, Winter 2013
"Annam Manthiram has crafted characters and situations that are charged, contemporary, and sometimes cruel; they make their way, often clumsily and without compunction, through situations drunk with the impossibility of enmeshing Indian cultural ideas and customs against an American landscape."
-- Lisa Romeo, ForeWord Reviews, Winter, 2012
"The experimental works are stunning."
-- Rosalie Morales Kearns, Fiction Writers Review, Winter, 2012
"Profoundly moving and intimately-told, these stories will stir a reader to tears, or bring out an unexpected smile. The woman still searching for love, even after everyone around her has given up, a baby boy dismissed by his grandparents, the obsession over a pancake race in a small Kansas town... Manthiram pulls you into these disparate worlds and proves that family dysfunction--at its most heart wrenching, its most comical--transcends all races."
-- Kavita Daswani, Author of Bombay Girl, Lovetorn, and others
"Dysfunction is a most arresting and compelling collection of stories, and because of their unexpected moments of comic bruise and lyrical intensity, I found myself thinking for a long time about these people and the trees and leaves and flowers, and other humans, they loved. That is testament to Annam Manthiram's grace with language and her way of looking at the world."
-- Susan Straight, Author of Between Heaven and A Million Nightingales
"The stories of Annam Manthiram's Dysfunction drift and return, like the mother's strange and tender promise to come back to her child as a Cottonwood Borer in the first story. There is a pain here, a gruesomeness felt in the hearts of Manthiram's characters--and, we see, in our world--that we try to turn away from. We wish we could. But with stories as brutally beautiful as these, we never will."
-- Nicole Louise Reid, Author of So There!