Experience reading like never before
Read in your favourite format - print, digital or both. The choice is yours.
Track the shipping status of your print orders.
Discuss with other readersSign in to continue reading.

"It was a wonderful experience interacting with you and appreciate the way you have planned and executed the whole publication process within the agreed timelines.”
Subrat SaurabhAuthor of Kuch Woh Pal
A Star Keeps Its Distance
Amaya Stein is twenty-eight years old, professionally capable, and very good at not wanting things she can't name.
She has a novel she is not writing. A biopsy scheduled for next week. And a K-pop assignment she did not ask for — her editor, who is also her aunt, has sent her to cover MYNX, one of the biggest acts in the world, at the height of their global tour.
Amaya arrives skeptical. She leaves change
A Star Keeps Its Distance
Amaya Stein is twenty-eight years old, professionally capable, and very good at not wanting things she can't name.
She has a novel she is not writing. A biopsy scheduled for next week. And a K-pop assignment she did not ask for — her editor, who is also her aunt, has sent her to cover MYNX, one of the biggest acts in the world, at the height of their global tour.
Amaya arrives skeptical. She leaves changed.
Somewhere between the fan chants and the fancams, the late-night messages on Echo with a stranger who turns out to be paying very close attention, and one kitchen in Manayunk where two people cook dinner without planning to, something in her stops managing itself from a safe distance.
Noah — Korean American, main vocalist, the one who writes the songs — has spent five years becoming the person the industry built him to be. He is very good at performing warmth. He is less practiced at the real thing. Amaya, who sees through performance for a living, is the wrong person to be this honest with.
Or the right one.
Set between Philadelphia and Seoul, A Star Keeps Its Distance is a love story about music, belonging, and the gap between who you perform yourself to be and who you actually are. It is about the things we hold at arm's length because naming them feels like too much — and the people who make us want to stop.
For readers of Beach Read, The Kiss Quotient, and People We Meet on Vacation — a warm, quiet romance with a lot of feeling in it.
A Star Keeps Its Distance
Amaya Stein is twenty-eight years old, professionally capable, and very good at not wanting things she can't name.
She has a novel she is not writing. A biopsy scheduled for next week. And a K-pop assignment she did not ask for — her editor, who is also her aunt, has sent her to cover MYNX, one of the biggest acts in the world, at the height of their global tour.
Amaya arrives skeptical. She leaves change
A Star Keeps Its Distance
Amaya Stein is twenty-eight years old, professionally capable, and very good at not wanting things she can't name.
She has a novel she is not writing. A biopsy scheduled for next week. And a K-pop assignment she did not ask for — her editor, who is also her aunt, has sent her to cover MYNX, one of the biggest acts in the world, at the height of their global tour.
Amaya arrives skeptical. She leaves changed.
Somewhere between the fan chants and the fancams, the late-night messages on Echo with a stranger who turns out to be paying very close attention, and one kitchen in Manayunk where two people cook dinner without planning to, something in her stops managing itself from a safe distance.
Noah — Korean American, main vocalist, the one who writes the songs — has spent five years becoming the person the industry built him to be. He is very good at performing warmth. He is less practiced at the real thing. Amaya, who sees through performance for a living, is the wrong person to be this honest with.
Or the right one.
Set between Philadelphia and Seoul, A Star Keeps Its Distance is a love story about music, belonging, and the gap between who you perform yourself to be and who you actually are. It is about the things we hold at arm's length because naming them feels like too much — and the people who make us want to stop.
For readers of Beach Read, The Kiss Quotient, and People We Meet on Vacation — a warm, quiet romance with a lot of feeling in it.
There is a word in Tamil that English has no equivalent for. Idam. It means place, but also space, but also belonging. You say it when you are looking for where you fit. You say it when you have found something.
Lakshmi Iyer has been asking idam enge, where is my place, since she left Madras at twenty-five with a suitcase and an arranged marriage and landed in southeastern Pennsylvania, where the winters were grey and the nearest temple was a Sunday dr
There is a word in Tamil that English has no equivalent for. Idam. It means place, but also space, but also belonging. You say it when you are looking for where you fit. You say it when you have found something.
Lakshmi Iyer has been asking idam enge, where is my place, since she left Madras at twenty-five with a suitcase and an arranged marriage and landed in southeastern Pennsylvania, where the winters were grey and the nearest temple was a Sunday drive away. The Smudged Hyphen is what happened next: twenty years of building a life between worlds, gathered into a collection that moves from the private to the political and back.
The essays range across marriage and its long negotiations, the silence around money in adoption, the bewilderment of raising white daughters as a brown woman in America, the body's quiet rebellions in midlife, the grief that arrives when a parent dies and keeps arriving. Iyer writes about vibuthi and K-pop, the politics of joy and the labour of festivals no one else in the house understands, the moment she looked at her father, the man she had idolized for his silence, and understood that his silence had a different name.
She does not resolve these tensions. The hyphen in the title is smudged, not erased. The essays hold contradictions: love and clear-eyed reckoning, rootedness and restlessness, the home you carry and the home you keep making. For anyone who has stood between two places and wondered if the space between counts as somewhere.
There is a word in Tamil that English has no equivalent for. Idam. It means place, but also space, but also belonging. You say it when you are looking for where you fit. You say it when you have found something.
Lakshmi Iyer has been asking idam enge, where is my place, since she left Madras at twenty-five with a suitcase and an arranged marriage and landed in southeastern Pennsylvania, where the winters were grey and the nearest temple was a Sunday dr
There is a word in Tamil that English has no equivalent for. Idam. It means place, but also space, but also belonging. You say it when you are looking for where you fit. You say it when you have found something.
Lakshmi Iyer has been asking idam enge, where is my place, since she left Madras at twenty-five with a suitcase and an arranged marriage and landed in southeastern Pennsylvania, where the winters were grey and the nearest temple was a Sunday drive away. The Smudged Hyphen is what happened next: twenty years of building a life between worlds, gathered into a collection that moves from the private to the political and back.
The essays range across marriage and its long negotiations, the silence around money in adoption, the bewilderment of raising white daughters as a brown woman in America, the body's quiet rebellions in midlife, the grief that arrives when a parent dies and keeps arriving. Iyer writes about vibuthi and K-pop, the politics of joy and the labour of festivals no one else in the house understands, the moment she looked at her father, the man she had idolized for his silence, and understood that his silence had a different name.
She does not resolve these tensions. The hyphen in the title is smudged, not erased. The essays hold contradictions: love and clear-eyed reckoning, rootedness and restlessness, the home you carry and the home you keep making. For anyone who has stood between two places and wondered if the space between counts as somewhere.
The last day of college. Her friends ahead at the bus stop. A book left under a tree. She turned back alone.
She did not come back the same.
Fifteen years later, in a Philadelphia conference room, she is face to face with the one person who was there that night and walked away.
Hindsight is a novel about what is taken from a woman when no one will name it. And what it costs, for everyone, when someone finally does.
The last day of college. Her friends ahead at the bus stop. A book left under a tree. She turned back alone.
She did not come back the same.
Fifteen years later, in a Philadelphia conference room, she is face to face with the one person who was there that night and walked away.
Hindsight is a novel about what is taken from a woman when no one will name it. And what it costs, for everyone, when someone finally does.
Are you sure you want to close this?
You might lose all unsaved changes.
India
Malaysia
Singapore
UAE
The items in your Cart will be deleted, click ok to proceed.