Jasmine

Front Cover
Grove Press, 1999 - Fiction - 241 pages

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR
ONE OF TIME' S "30 BOOKS TO READ BEFORE YOU'RE 30"

"Mukherjee gives us the gift of being allowed to see ourselves in all our inconsistencies . . . To build our hearts so they might always reflect, like Jasmine, what it means to carry what is fraught and scared and dismissive and hopeful and wild inside us, and choose love." --Mira Jacob, from the new introduction

When Jasmine was first published the New York Times called it "one of the most suggestive novels we have about what it is to become an American." Thirty years later, Jasmine has only grown in its significance. Following one woman through her numerous identities -- from Jyoti in a small village in Punjab, to Jasmine in Jalandhar, to Jase in Manhattan, to Jane in Iowa -- Mukherjee gives us an iconic character whose journey through shifting landscapes necessitates her shifting selves. What she encounters on this path, from India to America and from girlhood to womanhood, shows the beauty and darkness and revelation inherent in the journeys of all those who not only want to survive, but to grow.

With a new introduction by Mira Jacob for this thirtieth-anniversary edition, Jasmine is a masterful examination of identity, immigration, and sexuality from the "Matriarch of Indian-American literature." (Literary Hub)

 

Contents

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10
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20
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24
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29
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37
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42
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51
15
98
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102
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157

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Copyright

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About the author (1999)

Bharati Mukherjee was born in Calcutta, India on July 27, 1940. She received a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Calcutta in 1959 and a master's degree from the University of Baroda in 1961. After sending six stories to the University of Iowa, she was accepted into the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She received an M.F.A. in 1963 and a doctorate in comparative literature in 1969 from the University of Iowa. She married fellow student Clark Blaise, a Canadian author, in 1963. They moved to Montreal in 1966, where she taught English at McGill University. They moved back to the United States in 1980. After teaching creative writing at Columbia University, New York University, and Queens College, she taught postcolonial and world literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She wrote numerous books during her lifetime including The Tiger's Daughter, Wife, Darkness, Jasmine, The Holder of the World, Desirable Daughters, The Tree Bride, and Miss New India. In 1988, The Middleman and Other Stories won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. She died from complications of rheumatoid arthritis and takotsubo cardiomyopathy, a stress-induced heart condition, on January 28, 2017 at the age of 76.

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