Conversations with Bharati Mukherjee

Conversations with Bharati Mukherjee
Author: Bharati Mukherjee
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2009
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781604732276

The first naturalized citizen to win the National Book Critics Circle Award, Bharati Mukherjee (b. 1940), born into a rigid hierarchy as a Bengali Brahmin and raised in the elite of Calcutta society, joined the American masses by choice. This journey from a privileged yet circumscribed life to one of free will and risk supplied the experiences she has turned into literature. From her first interview, originally published over three decades ago in her native tongue Bengali in the Calcutta journal Desh and appearing here for the first time in English, to an in-depth interview in 2007 granted specifically for this collection, this volume provides a candid look at the woman who has been called the grande dame of diasporic Indian literature.

Jasmine

Jasmine
Author: Bharati Mukherjee
Publisher: Grove Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 1999
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780802136305

After the assassination of her husband, seventeen-year-old Jasmine leaves India to live with a middle-aged banker in a small Iowa town, only to retain some of the traditions and memories of the past.

Miss New India

Miss New India
Author: Bharati Mukherjee
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2011
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0618646531

Taken under the wing of an expat teacher for her ambition and talent, Anjali Bose hopes to escape unfavorable prospects and falls in with a crowd of young people in Bangalore, where she endeavors to confront her past and reinvent herself.

The Middleman

The Middleman
Author: Bharati Mukherjee
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2007-12-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0802196349

A National Book Critics Circle Award winner and New York Times Notable Book: “intelligent, versatile . . . profound” stories of migration in America (The Washington Post Book World). Illuminating a new world of people in migration that has transformed the essence of America, these collected stories are a dazzling display of the vision of this critically-acclaimed contemporary writer. An aristocratic Filipina negotiates a new life for herself with an Atlanta investment banker. A Vietnam vet returns to Florida, a place now more foreign than the Asia of his war experience. An Indian widow tries to explain her culture’s traditions of grieving to her well-intentioned friends. 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 a cultural fusion in the midst of its birth pangs, expressing a “consummated romance with the American language” (The New York Times Book Review).

Days and Nights in Calcutta

Days and Nights in Calcutta
Author: Clark Blaise
Publisher: Saint Paul, Minn. : Hungry Mind Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 1995
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

In 1973, Clark Blaise and his Bengali wife, Bharati Mukherjee, decided to spend a year with her family in Calcutta. Clark came as a Westerner; Bharati, as an adult woman examining her life as it might have become had she followed the traditional course expected of her. They recount a modern passage to India with insight, humor and compassion.

Holder of the World

Holder of the World
Author: Bharati Mukherjee
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2011-06-22
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307792285

“An amazing literary feat and a masterpiece of storytelling. Once again, Bharati Mukherjee prove she is one of our foremost writers, with the literary muscles to weave both the future and the past into a tale that is singularly intelligent and provocative.”—Amy Tan This is the remarkable story of Hannah Easton, a unique woman born in the American colonies in 1670, “a person undreamed of in Puritan society.” Inquisitive, vital and awake to her own possibilities, Hannah travels to Mughal, India, with her husband, and English trader. There, she sets her own course, “translating" herself into the Salem Bibi, the white lover of a Hindu raja. It is also the story of Beigh Masters, born in New England in the mid-twentieth century, an “asset hunter” who stumbles on the scattered record of her distant relative's life while tracking a legendary diamond. As Beigh pieces together details of Hannah's journeys, she finds herself drawn into the most intimate and spellbinding fabric of that remote life, confirming her belief that with “sufficient passion and intelligence, we can decontrsuct the barriers of time and geography....”

The Tiger's Daughter

The Tiger's Daughter
Author: Bharati Mukherjee
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Total Pages: 248
Release: 1996
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780449912706

Born in Calcutta and schooled in Poughkeepsie, Madison, Manhattan, beautiful, luminous Tara leaves her American husband behind as she journeys back to India. But the Calcutta she finds on her return -- seething with strikes, riots, and unrest -- is vastly different from the place she remembers. In this taut, ironic tale of colliding cultures, Tara seeks to reconcile the old world -- that of her father, the redoubtable Bengal Tiger -- and the brash new one that is being so violently ushered in. In this, her first novel, Mukherjee claimed as her subject the shock, uneasiness, and haphazard transformation that are part of the immigrant experience -- a theme she has masterfully woven into her subsequent novels, Wife and Jasmine, and into The Middleman and Other Stories, for which she won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Leave It to Me

Leave It to Me
Author: Bharati Mukherjee
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2011-04-27
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307792293

"A very fine writer, funny, intelligent, versatile and, on occasion, unexpectedly profound." --The Washington Post Book World "MUKHERJEE IS FEARLESS . . . DARING AND WITTY . . . Take the wild ride with Debby DiMartino from Albany to San Francisco, from lost child to masked avenger." --The Boston Globe "POWERFULLY WRITTEN . . . Debby has no memory of her birth parents. All she knows is that she was born in a remote Indian village, the daughter of a hippie back-packing mother and a mysterious Eurasian father, both of whom have disappeared almost without a trace. . . . Her quest for her biological parents turns into an obsession. . . . Leave It to Me . . . shows Mukherjee at the peak of her craft. . . . Mixing the Greek myth of Electra with the Indian myth of Devi, she sends Devi/Debby careening down on the Bay Area like an elemental force of vengeance." --San Francisco Chronicle "DEVI IS A BRILLIANT CREATION--hilarious, horribly knowing and even more horribly oblivious--through whom Bharati Mukherjee, with characteristic and shameless ingenuity, is laying claim to speak for an America that isn't 'other' at all." --The New York Times Book Review "STUNNING . . . An astute, ironic, and merciless insight into an aberrant version of the American dream." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

The Meagre Tarmac

The Meagre Tarmac
Author: Clark Blaise
Publisher: Biblioasis
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2011-08-27
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1926845331

An Indo-American Canterbury Tales, by a North American master of short fiction.

Conversations with V. S. Naipaul

Conversations with V. S. Naipaul
Author: Feroza F. Jussawalla
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 206
Release: 1997
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780878059454

This collection brings together interviews from a thirty-six-year span and reveals a witty, sometimes scathing talker with a free-ranging curiosity. In early interviews, mostly given to such fellow writers and colleagues as Derek Walcott and Eric Roach, Naipul is clipped, brusque, and clearly impatient with interviewers. More recent interviews, given primarily to journalists rather than literary figures, reveal a more mellow Naipaul, often warm, passionate, and forthcoming about his private life.