Fierce and bold, these beautiful stories provide a highly kinetic
exploration of sameness and difference in terms of ethnic and racial
origin. Through a romp of language--vital, outrageous,
unpredictable--the fireworks of Neela Vaswani's original genius cast
shadows and illumine psyches that conventional monovisions never
perceive. The stories of Where the Long Grass Bends are for readers
willing to view the shape-shifting of both reality and literary form.
Vaswani's characters embrace their fates through such rigorous birthing
that what has been internal finally contains and defines them.--Sena
Jeter Naslund
If it is true, as one of Vaswani's characters claims, that a musical
movement is the equivalent of a sentence, then the stories in Where the
Long Grass Bends comprise an uncanny and beautiful symphony. This is a
luminous collection, where each fiction evolves its own mythology. I
want to live in the world of these stories just as I am afraid of this
beautiful and often dark world. Neela Vaswani's Where the Long Grass
Bends is lovely, strange, lyrical, full of true mystery.--Victoria
Redel
Where the Long Grass Bends is a delight of invention and language. In
whirling, catch-me-if-you-can prose, Vaswani tells stories that subvert
conventional narrative by employing Indian lore, Gaelic fable, and
historical legend. Spare, fierce, and unpredictable, this debut
collection is boundless, even boundary-less, because Vaswani has, as
David Garnett said of Virginia Woolf, a mind that sticks to nothing.
Neela Vaswani lives in New York. Her short stories have appeared in
numerous journals, including Prairie Schooner, American Literary
Review, and Global City Review. In 1999, she was awarded the Italo
Calvino Prize. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland,
and teaches in the Master of Fine Arts in Writing program at Spalding
University.
