Bharati Mukherjee

SHE WAS AS SULTRY AND HOT AS THE EXOTIC HAWAIIAN ISLANDS SHE LOVED Captain Morgan Tucker saw Jasmine dancing one night and assumed she was a tiger in bed. So he had her abducted and brought to his ship. Too late he discovered he had seduced a virgin. When Jasmine thought she was pregnant, her father forced Captain Tucker to marry her. Though they were united in passion, Jasmine believed Morgan did not really care for her. Morgan thought the beautiful creature in his bed incapable of real love. Set in the mid 1800s against the struggles of the Hawaiian people to free themselves of foreign rule, here is a passionate tale of two lovers who must learn to express what is in their hearts.

The title of Wife is both ironic and deeply serious. There are wittily sharp poems on the gender inequalities and potential prisons of marriage, that are in dialogue with poems that celebrate the physical joys of intimacy and poems that explore the processes of self-creation that take place in the closeness to the male other. Poems that are cutting about male self-deceptions and arrogations of power speak to poems that display a deep sensitivity to the aloneness of the embattled male psyche. This is not verse in the confessional mode, but poems that take on other voices, other histories and explore the relationship between experiences and the way we mythologise them. These spare, elegant poems are not only intensely body focused and attentive to the minutiae of domestic space, but that they make connections to the worlds of family, church, village and nation - and even, in a poem the references the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, to the soul. Their context is a Virgin Islands' past, a Black American present, and an enlarged human future.

"When Tara Banerjee Cartwright, the heroine of this elegant first novel, returns to her native Calcutta for a summer, she finds she must not only become an intermediary between two cultures but also bear witness to the downfall of her own class. Tara is the adored, beautiful, and intellectually gifted daughter of Bengal Tiger Banerjee, a wealthy tobacco manufacturer, who is, in turn, descended from Hari Lal, a poet and physician who once quelled a Hindu-Moslem riot. Tiger Banerjee has sought to broaden his daughter's horizons by sending her to Vassar and to graduate school in America, where she has met her American husband, David Cartwright. Tara's trip home forces her to come to terms with her two worlds--and the growing realization that the Brahmin class to which she was born is about to undergo a siege and possibly suffer ultimate defeat.^ The Banerjees' house on Camac Street, cooled every hour by a spray of scented rose water, symbolizes the elegant, protected atmosphere in which Tara grew up. Outside, in the bustling alleys of Calcutta, starving naked children eat yoghurt and rice off the sidewalks and swarms of hoodlums call for revolution. Tara, who adores her handsome if naive father and her religious mother, is shocked at her own feelings of distaste for aspects of her heritage--the funeral pyres, the teeming life of the slums, and the intensity of the masses' needs. Bharati Mukherjee, who writes with delicate irony and sharp-eyed perception, has painted a memorable portrait of a refined yet aware young woman who is entirely sensible to the anomalies of her position. As Tara strives to recall her husband's liberal ideas, she at the same time views with sympathy the absurdity and vulnerability of her high-caste friends' lives.^ 'While her personal story remains the foreground of the novel, it is the fate of her class and all of India that hangs in the balance. Sensitive to the vibrations, the sounds, and the smells of Indian life, Bharati Mukherjee has given her novel a special texture--like that of the silk lining to a rajah's pocket. Her vision of India's destiny hovers--slightly off center--always quizzical and penetrating."--Jacket.

Rappaccini's daughter / Nathaniel Hawthorne -- [The black cat]( / Edgar Allan Poe -- [Bartleby, the scrivener]( / Herman Melville -- [The story of an hour]( / Kate Chopin -- An outpost of progress / Joseph Conrad -- The yellow wallpaper / Charlotte Perkins Gilman -- The open boat / Stephen Crane -- [Araby]( / James Joyce -- The horse dealer's daughter / D.H. Lawrence -- Bliss / Katherine Mansfield -- Rope / Katherine Anne Porter -- [A rose for Emily]( / William Faulkner -- A clean, well-lighted place / Ernest Hemingway -- The lamp at noon / Sinclair Ross -- Why I live at the P.O. / Eudora Welty -- My heart is broken / Mavis Gallant -- The loons / Margaret Laurence -- Dulse / Alice Munro -- Inland passage / Jane Rule -- A & P / John Updike -- Fogbound in Avalon / Elizabeth McGrath -- The conversion of the Jews / Philip Roth -- The motor car / Austin C. Clarke -- The concert stages of Europe / Jack Hodgins -- The resplendent quetzal / Margaret Atwood -- The tenant / Bharati Mukherjee -- Borders / Thomas King -- Everyday use / Alice Walker -- The naked man / Greg Hollingshead -- Cages / Guy Vanderhaeghe -- Two kinds / Amy Tan.

"After the firebombing of her San Francisco house and a coincidental meeting during a routine doctor's visit, Calcutta-born Tara Chatterjee is compelled to embark on a most American of journeys, a search for her roots. Her task is to trace the story of her great-great-aunt, Tara Lata, who at the age of five was married to a tree in the Indian village of Mishtigunj. Her search takes her into the heart of her family history - and the history of her ancestral village - and it results in surprising, at times shocking, and eventually cathartic findings. As the layers of the past are exposed, Tara learns that her current life is affected by events and individuals generations old: a pirate attack that leaves a mute orphan adrift in the Bengal Sea, an egomaniacal colonialist torn between his love for Tara Lata and his loyalty to the British Raj, and the discovery of a small fortune at the base of a sundari tree."--BOOK JACKET.

"In Desirable Daughters, Mukherjee has written a novel that is both the portrait of a traditional Brahmin family on the brink of its dissolution, and a contemporary American story of a woman who has outwardly broken with tradition, but still remains tied to her native country. In so doing, Mukherjee has also given us three extraordinary women - sisters - the "desirable daughters" of the title.". "Tara, the story's narrator, marries the perfect Indian man her parents select, then divorces him to carve out a life in San Francisco that in many ways is dazzlingly Californian. She and her sisters, though separated geographically and by radically different lifestyles, remain very close. When danger befalls Tara it is to her sisters and to her ex-husband that she turns for comfort and renewal, and for help in resolving the mystery that threatens to destroy her and all her family."--BOOK JACKET.

Debby DiMartino: saved from death in infancy by Gray Nuns at an Indian desert outpost; adopted as a toddler by Manfred and Serena DiMartino of Schenectady, New York; coming of age an inherently exotic girl in an inherently American town, never sure if she was someone special or just a special kind of misfit. Now, at twenty-three, she's decided that it's time to find out: time to track down her biological parents. She knows only the barest facts about them: her mother was a California flower child; her father, an "Asian national" serving life in an Indian prison for murder. She knows that they were "lousy people who'd considered me lousier still and who'd left me to be sniffed at by wild dogs, like a carcass in the mangy shade." Her only inheritance from them is a literally haunting past ("white-hot sky and burnt-black leaves...star bursts of yearning"), but now she wants revenge too. "When you inherit nothing, you are entitled to everything," Debby says as she leaves home for San Francisco, where, if she can't find her mother, she suspects she can appropriate what she needs. Yet, once there, living the life of her newly named persona, Devi Dee ("Tenderloin prowler, all allure and strength and zero innocence"), she senses that she may have inherited more than she imagined: a legacy of shocking idea and impulse begins to reveal itself as Debby/Devi focuses her sights on the woman who may be her "bio-mom," or just a dangerously unprepared proxy.

"This stunning stand alone from the author of New York Times bestseller The Tourist, follows the people on all sides of a domestic terrorist group, from the group's converts to the FBI agents investigating them. New York Times bestselling author Olen Steinhauer's next sweeping espionage novel traces the rise and fall of a domestic left-wing terrorist group. Told from the individual perspectives of an FBI agent, an undercover agent within the group, a convert to the terrorist organization, and a writer on the edges of the whole affair, this is another tightly wound thriller, and an intimate exploration of the people behind the politics, from a master of suspense"--

FLANNERY O'CONNOR, The Comforts of Home 3 ANN BEATTIE, It's Just Another Day in Big Bear City, California 22 MARK TWAIN, The $30,000 Bequest 37 EUDORA WELTY, Why I Live at the P.O. 62 WILLIAM GOYEN, Tapioca Surprise 73 STEPHEN CRANE, The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky 83 WILLIAM FAULKNER, [Barn Burning]( CONRAD AIKEN, Strange Moonlight 113 ELIZABETH SPENCER, Moon Rocket 124 TRUMAN CAPOTE, Children on Their Birthdays 133 JOHN UPDIKE, A & P 148 ALICE MUNRO, Miles City, Montana 155 LEE K. ABBOTT, The End of Grief 175 ERNEST HEMINGWAY, A Day's Wait 187 ELLEN WILBUR, Wind and Birds and Human Voices JOYCE CAROL OATES, Theft 214 BHARATI MUKHERJEE, The Tenant 255 AMY TAN, Rules of the Game 268 LOUISE ERDRICH, Love Medicine 279 CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN, The Yellow Wallpaper 301 TONI CADE BAMBARA, Maggie of the Green Bottles 316 ANTON CHEKHOV, The Darling 323 D. H. LAWRENCE, The Lovely Lady 334 HENRY JAMES, Paste 350 WILLA CATHER, The Way of the World 364 VIRGINIA WOOLF, Lappin and Lapinova 377 ZORA NEALE HURSTON, The Gilded Six-Bits 385 JAMES JOYCE, The Dead 395 DORIS LESSING, To Room Nineteen 431 TILLIE OLSEN, I Stand Here Ironing 460 RAYMOND CARVER, Boxes 467 GLORIA NAYLOR, The Two 481 SHIRLEY JACKSON, Flower Garden, 489 REGINALD McKNlGHT, The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas 511 HELENA MARIA VIRAMONTES, The Cariboo cafe 522 JOHN EDGAR WIDE-MAN, Fever 535 ANNA LEE WALTERS, The Warriors 558 GEORGE GARRETT, An Evening Performance 573 CHARLES JOHNSON, China 581 ESTELA PORTILLO TRAMBLEY, Pay the Criers 598 EDGAR ALLAN POE, [Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar]( KATHERINE ANNE PORTER, The Grave 623 ALLEN BARNETT, The Times As It Knows Us 629 BERNARD MALAMUD, Angel Levine 675 EDITH WHARTON, Afterward 685 SARAH ORNE JEWETT, The Landscape Chamber 711 FRANZ KAFKA, A Report to an Academy 725 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, Drowne's Wooden Image 733 HERMAN MELVILLE, [Bartleby, the Scrivener]( JOHN CHEEVER, Torch Song 775

"The seeds for the twelve interconnected crime stories in Darkness came from the pages of the Italian daily papers. In sparse prose that echoes the files of a police report, Dacia Maraini gives a resounding voice to the string of victims who receive only fleeting mention in the media each day. Among them is twelve-year-old Viollca, an Albanian sold into prostitution by her parents, who hope she will soon return with enough money to pay for her dowry and a new roof. And the boy Tano, who brings charges of physical abuse against his father. Two years and the death of his younger brother pass before anyone at the police station will believe him. Linking the collection together is Adele Sofia, a steel-nerved though tenderhearted police commissioner with a penchant for licorice at various points on the investigative trail, and whose job it is to hunt down those who prey on society's weakest and most vulnerable members. Told in a straight forward, unforgettably powerful and affecting manner in which the facts speak for themselves, Darkness illuminates the underbelly of Rome. With absorbing compassion and discretion Maraini creates a cast of characters who wake up each morning to a reality quite different from la dolce vita."--BOOK JACKET.

With reference to the coastal areas of Chattagram and Cox's Bāzār districts in Bangladesh.