The Middle Man and Other Stories: The Middleman, A Wife's Story, Loose End, Orbiting, Fighting for the Rebound, The Tenant, Fathering, Jasmine, Danny's Girls; Buried Lives, The Management of Grief [Paperback]

Bharati Mukherjee (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 29, 1990

The text is a collection of erotic stories and a novella from the author of "Darkness". Many of these have not been previously published. However, those which have appeared in publications such as 'Mother Jones' and 'Playboy'.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com 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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 197 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd; 1 edition (March 29, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140104410
• ISBN-13: 978-0140104417
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 4.9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #491,972 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Award-winning Indian-born American author Bharati Mukherjee was born in Calcutta (now called Kolkata) in 1940, the second of three daughters born to Bengali-speaking, Hindu Brahmin parents. She lived in a house crowded with 40 or 50 relatives until she was eight, when her father's career brought the family to live in London for several years.

She returned to Calcutta in the early 1950s where she attended the Loreto School. She received her B.A. from the University of Calcutta in 1959 as a student of Loreto College, and earned her M.A. from the University of Baroda in 1961. She next travelled to the United States to study at the University of Iowa, where she received her M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1963 and her Ph.D. in 1969 from the department of Comparative Literature.

After more than a decade living in Montreal and Toronto in Canada, Mukherjee and her husband, internationally acclaimed author Clark Blaise, returned to the United States. She wrote of the decision in "An Invisible Woman," published in a 1981 issue of "Saturday Night." Mukherjee and Blaise co-authored "Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977) and "The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy (Air India Flight 182)" (1987).
Mukherjee taught at McGill University, Skidmore College, Queens College, and City University of New York. She is currently a professor in the English department at the University of California, Berkeley.

Mukherjee is best known for her novels "The Tiger's Daughter" (1971); "Wife" (1975); "Jasmine" (1989); "The Holder of the World" (1993); "Leave It to Me" (1997); "Desirable Daughters" (2002); "The Tree Bride" (2004); and "Miss New India" (2011). Her short story collections and memoirs include "Darkness" (1985); "The Middleman and Other Stories" (1988); and "A Father". Non Fiction works include: "Days and Nights in Calcutta"; and "The Sorrow and the Terror."

She was the winner of the 1988 National Book Critics Circle Award for "The Middleman and Other Stories."

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Excellent Collection of Diverse Stories, September 7, 2005

By 

Richard Kurtz (NYC<P>NYC, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Middleman and Other Stories (Paperback)

Two of my most prominent reading passions are Asian books and, in particular, those set in India or concerned with the Indian sub- culture (e.g. any of Rohinton Mistry's books, The Namesake, Death of Vishnu, Red Carpet, etc) and collections of short stories.
But what makes this collection so special is that Ms. Mukherjee does not focus on her Indian roots, though several stories do concern people of Indian heritage, but cover many diverse cultures -- Italian- Americans, An Iraqi Jew, a Vietnam veteran in Florida and express a wide range of "voices." These stories are particularly effective in that you find yourself involved in the characters and their circumstances almost instantly. It is as if you had prior knowledge of them as you begin to read any one of the stories.
She also has a literary "trick" of sorts that I really enjoyed in that she will make reference to some little item --almost as a throwaway that was featured in an earlier story in the collection. It is very subtle but a nice little device that I caught on to and served to enhance the experience even more.
And though this collection was published sometime ago I found these wonderful stories still timely. I would highly recommend this collection to anyone who enjoys this genre.
Now on to purchase soem of her other works.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars BEST INDIAN WRITER BY FAR, February 14, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Middleman and Other Stories (Paperback)

You can hardly call her a "Indian women writer" that seems too narrow. She writes boldly and assumes roles that only a cosummate writer can do. Her Middleman story set the stage and then each story just got better. Forget Divakurani whose books are overarated, if you want to read "Indian women writers", then Bharti Mukherjee has no equal in this genre. She is astounding, fresh, and tanscends her category.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I Can Still Remember Some of It, May 25, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Middleman and Other Stories (Mass Market Paperback)

Even after five years. A real author's author, Mukherjee's prose deserves wider recognition. When I read this collection, I got the sense that she could write the next Great American Novel.