Mad Country
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Samrat Upadhyay’s new collection vibrates at the edges of intersecting cultures. Journalists in Kathmandu are targeted by the government. A Nepali man studying in America drops out of school and finds himself a part of the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. A white American woman moves to Nepal and changes her name. A Nepali man falls in love with a mysterious foreign black woman. A rich kid is caught up in his own fantasies of poverty and bank robbery. In the title story, a powerful woman, the owner of a construction company, becomes a political prisoner, and in stark and unflinching prose we see both her world and her mind radically remade.
Through the course of the stories in this collection, Upadhyay builds new modes of seeing our interconnected contemporary world. A collection of formal inventiveness, heartbreak and hope, it reaffirms Upadhyay’s position as one or our most important chroniclers of globalization and exile.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
These smart and compelling stories by Upadhyay (Buddha's Orphans) present poignant meditations on personal identity and nationality. The protagonists experience dramatic transformations and conflicts of self. In the title story, successful Nepalese businesswoman Anamika Gurung must employ varying personas in order to provide for her ailing husband and rescue her delinquent son from police detention in Kathmandu. While she is usually able to successfully navigate the oppressive class hierarchies, failed ideologies, and broken patriarchal institutions of her homeland, things change when Anamika is inexplicably labeled a political prisoner. "America the Great Equalizer" centers on Biks, a Nepali graduate student in political science at Northern Illinois University. Following the shooting of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson, Biks wrestles with his own identity in the shadow of riots in Ferguson, Mo., inevitably joining the unrest. In "Fast Forward," Shalini Malla, a celebrity magazine editor in Nepal, angers the Ministry of Information and Communications by publishing investigative reports about atrocities committed by the government's security forces. Shalini's push for Western press freedoms results in brutality and disappearances among her journalist team. Upadhyay's characters traverse global intersections, moving through collisions between cultures, and violent political revolts both external and internal. This is a timely and remarkable collection.
