About the Book: Old Demons New Deities: Contemporary Stories From Tibet
Split between political occupation and exile, scattered across continents, languages, new professions and lifestyles, what common self can Tibetans muster today? With its appetite for and attentiveness to experience, Old Demons New Deities disarms the question. Tenuous belonging is the theme of choice in these stories, explored with warmth and style, worldly wisdom and sly humour. Choosing not to lean on the armature of nationalist cant or religious tradition, they embrace human variety and desire, the animating principle of the imagination. This is what makes the future viable, for the world at large no less than Tibet.
Endorsements:
‘Paints the most real and haunting portraits of Tibetan lives in all their complexities and contradictions’—Tsering Shakya ‘A long-overdue and brilliantly edited volume on the Tibetan experience’—Gary Shteyngart
‘Tenzin Dickie is to be congratulated on having gathered here these twenty-one short stories by arguably the best Tibetan authors writing today’—Leonard W.J. van der Kuijp.
About the Author: Tenzin Dickie
Tenzin Dickie is a writer and literary translator in New York City. Her writings and translations have appeared in Tibetan Review, Indian Literature, Cultural Anthropology, Washington Post online, Himal South Asian, Words Without Borders and Modern Poetry in Translation. She is editor of Treasury of Lives, a biographical encyclopedia of Tibet, Inner Asia and the Himalayan Region. A 2014–15 fellow of the American Literary Translators’ Association, she holds an MFA from Columbia and a BA in English literature from Harvard.
