Anita Desai
Short-listed three times for the Booker Prize, Anita Desai is the award-winning author of over a dozen novels and collections, including: her latest, The Artist of Disappearance, Fasting, Feasting, Clear Light of Day, Baumgartner’s Bombay, and The Zigzag Way. Her novels have been translated into twenty languages and she is the recipient of many other prizes, including the National Academy of Letters Award.
“Desai is more than smart; she’s an undeniable genius.”
–Washington Post Book World
“[Desai] makes the apparently exotic . . . seem as universal, as vital and familiar, as the food on our plates.”
–Francine Prose, New York Times Book Review
“Anita Desai is one of the most brilliant and subtle writers ever to have described the meeting of eastern and western culture.”
–Alison Lurie
The Artist of Disappearance
“In three ensnaring novellas of consummate artistry and profoundly disquieting perception s, master storyteller Desai reflects on the transforming power and devastating limitations of art… Desai’s provocative and mysterious tales of displacement trace the reverberations when the dream of art collides with crushing reality.”
–Booklist, starred
“…poignant and wry…a deft exploration of the limits people place on themselves by trying to cling to the past.”
–Kirkus Reviews
“This collection leaves an indelible impression of the conflicts and ambitions found in a region riddled with conflict.”
–Publishers Weekly
Award-winning, internationally acclaimed author Anita Desai ruminates on art and memory, illusion and disillusion, and the sharp divide between life’s expectations and its realities in three perfectly etched novellas. Set in India in the not-too-distant past, the stories’ dramas illuminate the ways in which Indian culture can nourish or suffocate. All are served up with Desai’s characteristic perspicuity, subtle humor, and sensitive writing.
Overwhelmed by their own lack of purpose, the men and women who populate these tales set out on unexpected journeys that present them with a fresh sense hope and opportunity. Like so many flies in a spider’s web, however, they cannot escape their surroundings — as none of us can. An impeccable craftsman, Desai elegantly reveals our human frailties and the power of place.
