by Victor Rangel-Ribeiro ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 11, 2017
A remarkable collection that fans of literary short fiction should deeply enjoy.
Awards & Accolades
Our Verdict
GET IT
A decades-spanning volume of short stories depicts the foibles of family and culture.
Rangel-Ribeiro (Baroque Music: A Practical Guide for the Performer, 2016, etc.) follows the lives of Indians at home and abroad in this thematically linked collection. The first two sections of the book, set in Goa and Mumbai, track characters as they navigate the shifting landscape between tradition and modernity. In the title story, the town of Tivolem is forced to deal with a local thief who can’t help himself from stealing—in obvious fashion—the possessions of his neighbors. In “Moon Dance,” two impoverished aristocrats argue over money in an antique carriage on the way home from a fair. In “Night Encounter,” a student’s viewing of a salacious American film inspires him to wander the Bombay streets at night, searching for adventure: “The papers said you had only to step out into the streets of an evening to be accosted by painted houris; pimps would sidle up to passersby, offering illicit pleasures. Had he somehow picked the wrong time, or the wrong day?” The final section is set in New York and concerns the experiences of Indian immigrants and their families as they assimilate into the American melting pot. In “A Kiss for Nandini,” a white American wedding crasher stumbles into an Indian wedding and falls for the eponymous bridesmaid. In “Lonely Aging Chinese-American New York Neighbor Lady,” an elderly Indian widow arrives in New York to live with her son and becomes fascinated by her Chinese neighbor across the street. Rangel-Ribeiro’s prose is lush and funny and perfectly captures the parochial worldviews of his vivid characters. The appealing collection represents the author’s work going back to 1949, and most of these tales feel distinctly like they are from another time. This works in their favor as old settings, expressions, and ways of telling a story combine perfectly into the short fiction equivalent of comfort food. Standouts include “Angel Wings,” “Loving Ayesha,” “How I Missed My Chance to Become a Real Porn Star,” and “Uncle Prabhu’s Special Y2K Party.”
A remarkable collection that fans of literary short fiction should deeply enjoy.Pub Date: March 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9977797-1-4
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Serving House Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Share your opinion of this book
More by Victor Rangel-Ribeiro
BOOK REVIEW
by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Awards & Accolades
Likes
32
Our Verdict
GET IT
Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2015
Kirkus Prize
winner
National Book Award Finalist
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Share your opinion of this book
by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
Share your opinion of this book
More by J.D. Salinger
BOOK REVIEW
More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.