Sunil Yapa received his MFA from Hunter College, where he was awarded the Alumni Scholarship & Welfare Fund Fellowship and was selected twice as the Esquire Fiction Intern. In June 2010, he won the Asian American Short Story Award. In May 2010, Yapa was the writer-in-residence at the Norman Mailer Writers' Colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The son of a Sri Lankan father, and a mother from Montana, Yapa grew up in Pennsylvania, and has since traveled and lived in 48 states and 35 countries.
"Fast-paced and unflinching.... As these characters encounter one
another in a fog of tear gas and pepper spray, Yapa vividly evokes
rage and compassion. Underlying the novel, and at once reinforced
and rejected, is the chief's mantra: "Care too much and the world
will kill you cold."--New Yorker
"Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist is visceral, horrifying,
and often heroic. But above all, this book is a full-throated
chorus of voices on all sides--protestors, cops, delegates,
politicians, and ramblers--as democracy runs headlong into the
machinery of global power. Sunil Yapa has achieved something
special, a story that is as tragic as it is relevant, as
unflinching as it is humane."
--Smith Henderson, author of Fourth of July Creek
"[A] gripping debut...Yapa is a skilled storyteller, revealing just
enough about his characters and the direction of his plot to engage
his readers, yet effectively building dramatic impact by
withholding certain key details. In the style of Colum McCann's Let
the Great World Spin, Yapa ties together seemingly disparate
characters and narratives through a charged moment in history,
showing how it still affects us all in different
ways."--Booklist
"[A] gripping, profoundly humane first novel.... An absolutely
compelling read."--Bookpage
"A beautifully written book."--Entertainment Weekly
"A fantastic debut novel.... What is so enthralling about this
novel is its syncopated riff of empathy as the perspective jumps
around these participants--some peaceful, some violent, some
determined, some incredulous... Yapa creates a fluid sense of the
riot as it washes over the city. Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of
a Fist ultimately does for WTO protests what Norman Mailer's Armies
of the Night did for the 1967 March on the Pentagon, gathering that
confrontation in competing visions of what happened and what it
meant."--Ron Charles, Washington Post "A symphony of a novel. Sunil
Yapa inhabits the skins of characters vastly different to himself:
a riot cop in Seattle, a punk activist, a disillusioned world
traveler and a high-level diplomat, among others. Through it all
Yapa showcases a raw and rare talent. This is a protest novel which
finds, at its core, a deep and abiding regard for the music of what
happens. In the contemporary tradition of Aleksandar Hemon and
Phillipp Meyer, with echoes of Michael Ondaatje and Arundhati Roy,
Yapa strives forward with a literary molotov cocktail to light up
the dark."--Colum McCann, author of the National Book Award winner
Let the Great World Spin
"A great wrenching beautiful book."--Laline Paull, author of The
Bees
"A vital, powerful read, Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist
is an absorbing, multi-faceted, acutely hopeful novel."--Patrick
deWitt, author of Undermajordomo Minor and The Sisters Brothers
"An achingly compassionate fiction debut."--O Magazine
"An open-armed love letter to humanity, this glorious novel loops
around a burning center encompassing the warmth of parents and the
coolness of patriarchy. Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist
will compel you to look and then to witness. 'We are mad with hope'
the narrator says early on, and by the end the reader is
too."--Tiphanie Yanique, author of Land of Love and Drowning
"As electric a novel as I've ever read."
--Benjamin Percy, Esquire
"Chilling...A memorable, pulse-pounding literary
experience."--Publisher's Weekly
"Explosive."--Entertainment Weekly
"If you're looking for a novel that moves with heat this winter,
look no further."--Flavorwire
"In this beautifully written, kaleidoscopically shifting novel....
Yapa penetrates to the human connections and disconnections at play
between the lines of history in the era of the global
village."--Chicago Tribune
"It's not often that a novel takes a fraught event from the recent
past, one that most of us only experienced in the flash of the
cable news cycle or the static of print headlines, and imbues it
with so much heart and soul that we do something we almost never do
in the constant crush forward and faster-we pause and reconsider.
That is the power of literature. Sunil Yapa's Your Heart is a
Muscle the Size of a Fist does just this for the momentous protests
of the 1999 World Trade Organization's (WTO).... Yapa does a heroic
job of journeying into the heart of this complex set of events,
illustrating how they grow out of and impact the character's lives.
And while the heart may be the size of a fist, here it
paradoxically seems to encompass the whole world and all of its
citizens, who pulse with its every beat."--The Rumpus
"Like magic, Yapa uses this handful of perspectives to create
snapshots that allow the reader to imagine who else was there that
day and what they were doing, thinking, and feeling...I can't
imagine a better book to have kicked off my year in
reading."--Bookriot
"Sunil Yapa's debut novel is possibly the most gorgeous book I've
read in my entire life... Yapa's pattern of meandering, artful,
full-bodied imagery, punctuated by zingy one-liners makes for a
seriously addictive read... It's painful. It's gorgeous. I can't
say this enough: read it."
--Bustle Magazine
"Sunil Yapa's voice and ambition leap off the page. Here is a
writer to watch."
--Minneapolis Star Tribune
"The energy and sheer humanity of Sunil Yapa's debut will grab you,
wrap you in, and won't let you go-and that's just the start of why
you're going to love this. Seven characters narrate this charged
book, which centers on a protest. It's so layered, you'll finish
this wondering how Yapa pulled off what he did."--Bustle
"There is nothing to say about Sunil Yapa's debut novel that its
wonderful title doesn't already promise--its heart beats and bleeds
on every page, in prose so raw it feels built of muscle and tissue
and sinew and sweat. This book is delightfully, forcefully alive,
and I feel more alive for having read it."--Eleanor Henderson,
author of Ten Thousand Saints
"This furiously paced and contrapuntal literary tour-de-force makes
use of multiple vantage points and benefits from a remarkably
empathic sensibility on the part of its author.... With Yapa
burrowing into the hearts of these characters, each distinct yet
sufferers all, his already weighty story attains a level of
profundity."--Miami Herald
"Yapa's melding of fact and fiction, human frailty and geopolitics,
is a genuine tour-de-force, and an exciting literary
debut."--Seattle Times
"Yapa's novel is a much-needed and refreshing pivot point. His
novel makes a case for the validity of all opinions in a conflict
the better part of two decades old. This rare quality of his work
is a practice that many could benefit from in current conflicts,
foreign and domestic."
--Denver Post
"Yapa's writing is visceral and unsparing. Noteworthy, capital-I
Important and a ripping read, his novel will be on many "best"
lists in 2016."--Library Journal (starred review)
"Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist is a stunningly
orchestrated, symphonic work of narrative power. This novel
marshals all the vital forces of our existence--from the domestic
to the political--and offers them to the reader with equal doses of
compassion and beauty."--Dinaw Mengestu, author of All Our Names
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