3 Review(s)

Insects Are Just Like You And Me Except Some Of Them Have Wings is a collection of thirty-five short stories. Summary Of The Book Kuzhali Manickavel’s debut short story collection is full of stories with a interesting mix of normal and fictitious characters and incidents. Some stories include commonplace happenings, whereas some are bizarre and unheard of. In one of the stories titled, Do You Know How To Twist With Girls Like This, one of the characters, Mira, has lost a lot of weight and maybe anorexic. Kuzhali paints the character with such honesty, that Mira’s friends believe in breaking off all that was in her shoulders and ankles and keeping it under her bed for a rainy day. Similarly, in Ezekial Solomon’s Shoe, Seshadri remembers Ezekial Solomon as a boy with a shoe that is filled with insects. One look at the shoe and there, along with Seshadri, we see wriggling insects and the shoe becomes a stunning reminder of the missing Solomon. Though Seshadri refuses to acknowledge this memory, slowly in his mind, Solomon becomes the shoe. The book also contains stories about nosebleeds and a mouse who is called Miraculous. The stories in this book contain themes of surrealism, isolation, magic realism and dislocation. A reader cannot predict the path of each story and may be shocked with the ending of many, as sometimes they don’t even adhere to the common theme of the story. The stories in Insects Are Just Like You And Me Except Some Of Them Have Wings are set in a typical Indian setting. The stories also relate with the title of the collection. In most of the stories, we find insects, wriggling worms, fluttering butterflies and many more. About Kuzhali Manickavel Kuzhali Manickavel is an author. Kuzhali has also written Eating Sugar, Telling Lies. Kuzhali Manickavel was born in Winnipeg, Canada, and has spent her childhood in places around Canada. She moved back to India after the age of thirteen. Currently, she lives in Chidambaram, a small town in Tamil Nadu. Kuzhali’s short stories have made rounds in various online publications such as Versal Literary Journal, Shimmer magazine, and PANK.