Karma and Other Stories (P.S.)

Karma and Other Stories (P.S.)
Rishi Reddi
ISBN 0060898828

Multigenerational and international, the characters in Reddi's unique stories long for the comfort of the past while building unfamiliar and friable new lives in America. Finding the right balance between traditional Indian culture and the allure of contemporary Western life becomes a high-stakes juggling act -- a gamble that they can't always win.

A contentious septuagenarian reunites with a childhood friend after an unlikely argument threatens to erase decades of history; a 15-year acquaintance with the town's librarian tempts a middle-aged housewife to consider the unthinkable; a young, assimilated college student condemns her best friend for consenting to an arranged marriage; a widow flees her son's comfortable American life and returns to the village of her birth; a young husband and father finds success disappointingly elusive and spends his days on Boston's wintry streets, rescuing injured birds.

Proud, lonely, despairing, and hopeful, Reddi's characters and the stories that surround them not only animate the struggle between tradition and a new way of life but also bear witness to the common ground we all share. That Reddi is able to transcend the confines
of immigrant literature, choosing instead to examine the universal themes of love, loss, family, and duty, marks Karma and Other Stories as a resonant and gifted debut.

(Summer 2007 Selection)

Yellow: Stories

Yellow: Stories
Don Lee
ISBN 0393323080

Yellow is Don Lee's brilliant collection of stories, many of them set in the fictional town of Rosarita Bay. Peopled with several Asian-American characters who appear in more than one story, they each share a similar experience: handling the prejudice that accompanies being "yellow," in addition to their own insecurities. In the clever, mysterious story "The Price of Eggs in China," we meet the "Oriental Hair Poets," two fiercely competitive women who vie not only over their poetry but for the affections of a master chair maker who doesn't quite know what to make of them. A Korean-American woman comes to town to visit her sister in "The Lone Night Cantina," but fresh from a breakup, realizes she'd been spending time with someone she didn't really love rather than face the possibility of hurt and solitude. The title character in "The Possible Husband" is an investment analyst who made a fortune and retired young to pursue surfing full-time and his latest fancy, serial monogamy. He's "looking for the perfect woman, just like [he's] looking for the perfect wave." And in the title novella, "Yellow," readers follow Danny Kim from his childhood to his climb up the corporate ladder to a marriage with a woman for whom he feels little passion but with whom he feels safe. In each of his stories, Don Lee's writing is fresh, with sharply defined characters and a dark, biting sense of humor. (Spring 2001 Selection)

Unaccustomed Earth

Unaccustomed Earth
Jhumpa Lahiri
ISBN 0676979343

In the stunning title story, Ruma, a young mother in a new city, is visited by her father, who carefully tends the earth of her garden, where he and his grandson form a special bond. But he’s harboring a secret from his daughter, a love affair he’s keeping all to himself. In “A Choice of Accommodations,” a husband’s attempt to turn an old friend’s wedding into a romantic getaway weekend with his wife takes a dark, revealing turn as the party lasts deep into the night. In “Only Goodness,” a sister eager to give her younger brother the perfect childhood she never had is overwhelmed by guilt, anguish, and anger when his alcoholism threatens her family. And in “Hema and Kaushik,” a trio of linked stories–a luminous, intensely compelling elegy of life, death, love, and fate–we follow the lives of a girl and boy who, one winter, share a house in Massachusetts. They travel from innocence to experience on separate, sometimes painful paths, until destiny brings them together again years later in Rome.

All Aunt Hagar's Children

All Aunt Hagar's Children
Edward P. Jones
ISBN 0060557567

In fourteen sweeping and sublime stories, five of which have been published in The New Yorker, the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Known World shows that his grasp of the human condition is firmer than ever.

Returning to the city that inspired his first prizewinning book, Lost in the City, Jones has filled this new collection with people who call Washington, D.C., home. Yet it is not the city's power brokers that most concern him but rather its ordinary citizens. All Aunt Hagar's Children turns an unflinching eye to the men, women, and children caught between the old ways of the South and the temptations that await them further north, people who in Jones's masterful hands, emerge as fully human and morally complex, whether they are country folk used to getting up with the chickens or people with centuries of education behind them.
In the title story, in which Jones employs the first-person rhythms of a classic detective story, a Korean War veteran investigates the death of a family friend whose sorry destiny seems inextricable from his mother's own violent Southern childhood. In "In the Blink of God's Eye" and "Tapestry" newly married couples leave behind the familiarity of rural life to pursue lives of urban promise only to be challenged and disappointed.
With the legacy of slavery just a stone's throw away and the future uncertain, Jones's cornucopia of characters will haunt readers for years to come.

A Good Fall

A Good Fall
Ha Jin
ISBN 0307378683

A lonely composer takes comfort in the antics of his girlfriend's parakeet; young children decide to change their names so that they might sound more "American," unaware of how deeply this will hurt their grandparents; a Chinese professor of English attempts to defect with the help of a reluctant former student. All of Ha Jin's characters struggle in situations that stir within them a desire to remain attached to be loyal to their homeland and its traditions as they explore and avail themselves of the freedom that life in a new country offers.