ARRANGED MARRIAGE: Stories

From an award-winning Indian-born poet, now California-based, a first collection of 11 stories that describe what is both universal and unique about the experience of Indian women in America and at home. The characters have much to cope with: Life's inconveniences are even more pronounced for women who must submit to the arrangements of others--their parents, their husbands, fate--not merely in deciding whom they'll marry, but how they'll conduct themselves in every aspect of their lives. And for many of them these difficulties are again compounded as they attempt to maintain their ethnic identity in a new land where even a 7-Eleven can seem impossibly exotic. Contemporary Indian women trying to make sense of a world that is simultaneously static and ever-changing.