The Middleman
And Other Stories
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- US$9.99
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- US$9.99
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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).
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As evidenced in her first short story collection Darkness and two novels, The Tiger's Daughter and Wife, Mukherjee's central preoccupation is the problematical nature of personal encounters between East and West. These expertly crafted tales continue to have that focus; all turn on recent Third World immigrant experience in or closely affected by North America. Mukherjee makes the ambitious attempt to narrate through the voices of characters as diverse as a middle-class Italian-American suburbanite, a Sephardic mercenary from Smyrna by way of Flushing, Queens, a Trinidadian mother's helper and an Atlantan investment banker. But in striving for extended range she sometimes undercuts the authenticity and immediacy of her stories. The most successful tales are those told from the point of view of characters from the Indian subcontinent, especially women. It is Mukherjee's keen eye for telling and sensuous detail that make these stories rewarding. Her limpid prose has a capacity to surprise with trenchant wit and delight with finely calibrated lyricism.
