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Darkness

Darkness

Stories

by Bharati Mukherjee
Afterword by Clark Blaise

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Product Details

Nonpareil Books

Softcover
ISBN: 978-1-56792-746-7
Pages: 208
Size: 5.25" x 7.5"
Published: January 2023
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Twelve stories of immigrants who navigate the ancestral past of India as they remake their lives—and themselves—in North America. These are stories of fluid and broken identities, discarded languages and deities, and the attempt to create bonds with a new community against the ever-present fear of failure and betrayal.

“The narrative of immigration,” Bharati Mukherjee once wrote, “is the epic narrative of this millennium.” Her stories and novels brilliantly add to that ongoing saga. In the story “The Lady from Lucknow,” a woman is pushed to the limit while wanting nothing more than to fit in. In “Hindus,” characters discover that breaking away from a culture has deep and unexpected costs. In “A Father,” the clash of cultures leads a man to an act of terrible violence. “How could he tell these bright, mocking women,” Mukherjee writes, “that in the darkness, he sensed invisible presences: gods and snakes frolicked in the master bedroom, little white sparks of cosmic static crackled up the legs of his pajamas. Something was out there in the dark, something that could invent accidents and coincidences to remind mortals that even in Detroit they were no more than mortal.”

There is light in these stories as well. The collection’s closing story, “Courtly Vision,” brings to life the world within a Mughal miniature painting and describes a light charged with excitement to discover the immense intimacy of darkness. Readers will also discover that excitement, and the many gradations of darkness and light, throughout these pages from the mind of a master storyteller. 

Author: Bharati Mukherjee
Bharati Mukherjee was born in Calcutta and lived in Canada before moving to the United States. She attended college in India and received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Iowa. She was the author of eight novels, two short story collections, and two works of nonfiction with her husband, Clark Blaise. Her book The Middleman and Other Stories won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1988. She taught creative writing at Columbia, NYU, Queens College, and UC Berkeley. Mukherjee died in 2017.

Clark Blaise
Clark Blaise is the author of numerous novels, memoirs, short story collections, and works of nonfiction. He received his MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he met his soon-to-be-wife, Bharati Mukherjee. In 2009, Blaise was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.