![]() Bharati Mukherjee |
January 30, 2001 (Tuesday) 8:00 p.m. Joint Reading Recital Hall, PAC UAlbany's Uptown Campus 4:00 Informal Seminar, HU 354 UAlbany's Uptown Campus | ![]() Clark Blaise photo credit: Jerry Bauer |
"A born storyteller. . .a writer to savour." - The New York Times on Southern StoriesBharati Mukherjee is widely recognized as one of North America's leading chroniclers in fiction of the present wave of immigration to this hemisphere. The Middleman and Other Stories (1988, Grove Press, ISBN 0-8021-3650-8), for example, recounts the experiences not only of immigrants from India, but also form Israel, Vietnam, Trinidad, Afghanistan and Italy. The story collection received the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction."[a] fresh, idiosyncratic approach to what the short story can and should do." - Books in Canada
Mukherjee's most recent novel is Leave It to Me, which tells the story of Debby Martino, abandoned as a baby by an American hippie mother and Eurasian father in Indian, then adopted and raised by an Italian-American family in Schenectady, New York. Bereft of a sense of identity, Debby embarks on a quest in search of her birth-parents, ending up in the strange world of Haight Ashbury, with its left-over love children, addicts and visionaries. Publishers Weekly calls the book, "Stunning. . .An astute, ironic and merciless insight into an aberrant version of the American dream."
"A beautiful novel, poetic, exotic, perfectly controlled." - San Francisco Chronicle (Jasmine)Bharati Mukherjee teaches creative writing at the University of California at Berkeley. Clark Blaise is former director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and former professor of English at Skidmore College."A fable, a kind of impressionistic prose-poem, about being an exile, a refugee, a spiritual vagabond in the world today; Mukherjee has eloquently succeeded." - The New York Times (on Jasmine)
Writers Online Magazine Article |