About this item
Highlights
- In 1988, with her collection The Middleman and Other Stories, Bharati Mukherjee became the first naturalized American citizen to win the National Book Critics Circle Award.
- About the Author: BHARATI MUKHERJEE (1940-2017) is the author of over a dozen books, short-story collections, and works of nonfiction.
- 224 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Short Stories (single author)
Description
About the Book
A newly reissued version Bharati's "stunning" (Los Angeles Times) stories, with a new introduction by award-winning author, Madhuri Vijay.
Book Synopsis
In 1988, with her collection The Middleman and Other Stories, Bharati Mukherjee became the first naturalized American citizen to win the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Now reissued with an introduction by Pushcart Prize winner Madhuri Vijay, these characters and their stories shed new light on an America increasingly defined by movement, transience, fragmentation, and reinvention. As Vijay writes in her introduction, these characters are "constantly on the move, constantly in flux, shifting between lovers, jobs, nations, apartments, or all four at the same time." An aristocratic Filipina negotiates a new life for herself with an Atlanta investment banker. An Italian woman from New Jersey has an uncomfortable Thanksgiving when she brings her new Afghani boyfriend home to meet the family. And in the title story, an Iraqi Jew whose travels have ended in Queens suddenly finds himself an unwitting guerrilla in a South American jungle. Passionate, comic, violent, and tender, these stories draw us into the center of a cultural fusion, moments glowing with the energy and exuberance of a society remaking itself.
Review Quotes
"Bharati Mukherjee, in this astonishing second book of short stories, zeroes in on uneasy terrain that no one has looked at with quite so clear an eye since approximately World War II, the queasy crucible in which the American identity itself is alloyed."--Chicago Tribune
"Stunning . . . her characters stand on the shaky ground where East meets West and the sound of cultures clashing could shatter glass."--Los Angeles Times
"Intimate stories on the 'new' America . . . Mukherjee's ability to get inside a range of characters is astounding. . . . Her knowledge and insights into the lives of 'outsiders, ' her keen eye for detail and irony, and the political realities documented in her writing make this collection important reading."--San Francisco Chronicle
"With remarkable skill and grace the author has added a brilliant new chapter to the ongoing pageant of writing about the immigrant experience in America."--From the citation for the National Book Critics Circle Award
"The stories in this collection depict an America that is exceedingly strange. It is true they often feature the kinds of East-meets-West clashes that have become familiar to us in contemporary fiction, but to reduce them to such a bland précis would be to discount the unstable energy that fizzes through each page, rendering outlandish even the most commonplace American scene. A romantic breakup, a Thanksgiving dinner, or a visit to a pediatrician, mutate, in Mukherjee's hands, into bizarre performances, comic and terrifying in equal measure."--Madhuri Vijay, from the new introduction
"A consummated romance with the American language . . . a romance with America itself."--New York Times Book Review
About the Author
BHARATI MUKHERJEE (1940-2017) is the author of over a dozen books, short-story collections, and works of nonfiction. In 1988 she became the first naturalized American citizen to win the National Book Critics Circle award for her collection The Middleman and Other Stories.