Where the Long Grass Bends: Stories

by Neela Vaswani

Overview

Short fiction that leaps across borders and boundaries: “Fierce and bold . . . beautiful” (Sena Jeter Naslund).
 
In whirling, catch-me-if-you-can prose, Where the Long Grass Bends tells stories that subvert conventional narrative by employing Indian lore, Gaelic fable, and historical legend. Spare, fierce, and unpredictable, these tales from an American Book Award winner “play with the notion of culture and homeland from a variety of perpectives” (Kirkus Reviews).
 
“Vaswani shows impressive range and a striking command of poetic imagery in this debut collection, which features 13 stories dealing mostly with the Indian and Asian immigrant experience. ‘Sita and Mrs. Durber’ describes a British art teacher’s struggles to deal with a formidably talented Malaysian kindergartener, whose brilliant drawings reveal uncomfortable truths. ‘Five Objects in Queens,’ in which an Indian family uses familiar references from their homeland to help them acclimate to life in New York, falls closer to the terrain carved out by writers like Bharati Mukherjee.” —Publishers Weekly

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781936747177
Publisher:	Sarabande Books
Publication date:	01/01/2004
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	362 KB

About the Author

Neela Vaswani lives in New York. Her short stories have appeared in numerous journals, including Prairie Schooner, American Literary Review, and Global City Review. In 1999, she was awarded the Italo Calvino Prize. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland, and teaches in the Master of Fine Arts in Writing program at Spalding University.

Editorial Reviews

Thirteen stories by Indian-American Vaswani. The experiences of immigrants (or of their children) who have come to America but not quite found their feet here provides much of Vaswani's material in stories that play with the notions of culture and homeland from a variety of perspectives. The protagonist of "Bing-Chen," for example, is a half-Chinese, half-American adolescent who ventures into Chinatown for a haircut and reflects on his own inability to feel truly at home in either white or Asian society. In "Domestication of an Imaginary Goat," a young Indian woman in New York fantasizes with her American boyfriend about the home that she knows they will never have. Some of the tales are set abroad: The title story, for instance, is about the travails of a young orphaned girl living in a Catholic boarding school in India during an election riot, while "Sita and Mrs. Durber" follows a schoolteacher in India who tries to help a precocious but withdrawn girl. "Bolero" is the story of a boy who grows up on a farm during the Spanish Civil War and manages with some difficulty to emigrate to America, where he studies at Juilliard and goes on to become an orchestra conductor, while "Blue, Without Sorrow" offers a short family history from the perspective of a melancholy Mexican woman who recovered from a mortal illness as a girl and later moves to Arizona (after her father dies). There are also simpler stories that stand stylistically apart from the rest, like "The Rigors of Dance Lessons," about a husband and wife who (in what becomes an apparent metaphor of their marriage) sign up for dance lessons. A strange and not altogether satisfying mix: newcomer Vaswani takes up certain themes, but herwork seems not to have found an overriding focus or coherence.

Kirkus Reviews