Heterick Summer Book Bingo 2018

Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations.

The Accusation is a deeply moving and eye-opening work of fiction that paints a powerful portrait of life under the North Korean regime. The author wrote the stories while living in North Korea; the original manuscript was smuggled out of North Korea and first published in South Korea.

There's something unsettling about these stories, something dangerous, delightful, even funny. Characters are unsteady on their feet; they yearn for connection and betterment, but are tripped up by their impulses and insecurities. "Homesick for Another World" is a master class in the varieties of self-deception across the human condition. The flesh is weak; the timber is crooked. But beauty comes from strange sources. And the dark energy surging through these stories is invigorating.

An antiques dealer discovers that a legendary toy commissioned by Civil War General Robert E. Lee now sits in the home of a black minister in Queens. An American president draws inspiration from a conversation he overhears in a stable. And members of The Five-Carat Soul Bottom Bone Band recount stories from their own messy and hilarious lives. McBride writes with humor and insight about how we struggle to understand who we are in a world we don't fully comprehend.

In 1947, the Indian subcontinent was partitioned into two separate countries--India and Pakistan. An Unrestored Woman explores the mass displacement that ensued. In paired stories that hail from India, Pakistan, the United States, Italy, and England, we witness the ramifications of the uprooting of families and the price they pay over generations.

This collection explores the ties that bind parents and children, husbands and wives, lovers and friends to one another and to the places they call home. The stories are evocative, playful, subversive, and incredibly human.

From the fenlands of England grow stories that blend folklore and restless invention to turn out something entirely new. A teenager might starve herself into the shape of an eel. A house might fall in love with a girl. A boy might return from the dead in the guise of a fox. Out beyond the confines of realism, sex and hunger blend with the shifting, unpredictable wild as the line between human and animal is effaced by myth and metamorphosis in stories of women testing the limits of their power.

Samrat Upadhyay's new collection vibrates at the edges of intersecting cultures with heartbreak and hope. 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. Through the course of the stories in this collection, Upadhyay builds new modes of seeing our interconnected contemporary world.

Despondent diplomats play table tennis in zero gravity. Anthropologists record a language's last surviving speaker. An elephant and his driver cross the ocean to meet the whims of a Moroccan princess. With exuberant originality, Tharoor draws equally from ancient history and current events, speaking to contemporary challenges of environmental collapse and cultural appropriation, but also to the workings of legend and their timeless human truths.