The Middleman and Other Stories - Softcover

9780449217184: The Middleman and Other Stories
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"Funny, intelligent, versatile...profound."
THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD
These beautifully wrought stories reveal a new world that has been created imperceptibly in our midst: a United States transformed by many new faces from Afghanistan and Asia, from Uganda and Latin America. These immigrants have in turn been transformed by the "idea" of living in America. Passionate, comic, violent, and ultimately tender, these stories portray our latest arrivals in all their richness and variety, reflected in American eyes equally varied with fear, love, suspicion, or pure astonishment.
"Stunning...Her characters stand on the shaky ground where East meets West and the sound of cultures clashing could shatter glass."
LOS ANGELESTIMES
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR

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Review:
Told by fictional immigrants, the tales of arrival and survival spun by Mukherjee's protagonists often paralyze the reader with their realism. They come from Italy, Trinidad, Israel, Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Philippines and elsewhere to build new lives in such places as Ann Arbor, Atlanta, Manhattan and Miami. For all the troubles the immigrants endure, Mukherjee's portrayal of them as dauntless participants in the American experiment serves to empower them. Even as she's being raped by her employer, Jasmine, a housekeeper from Trinidad, ponders that she has "no nothing other than what she wanted to invent and tell." The Middleman won the 1988 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.
From Publishers Weekly:
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.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

  • PublisherFawcett Crest
  • Publication date1989
  • ISBN 10 0449217183
  • ISBN 13 9780449217184
  • BindingMass Market Paperback
  • Number of pages194
  • Rating

Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

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ISBN 10:  ISBN 13:  9780802136503
Publisher: Grove Press, 1999
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