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"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 mono-visions 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 character's 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 "A wonderfully intelligent collection, at once contemporary and magical. Vaswani's voice is witty, sharp, innovative, unique. A great debut!" —Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Fervent. Lyrical. Animistic. Incantatory. . . . Where the Long Grass Bends succumbs to no summary. It is a debut collection of stories that is boundless, even boundary-less, because Neela Vaswani has, as David Garnett said of Virginia Woolf, a mind that sticks at nothing. In whirling, catch-me-if-you-can prose, Vaswani tells stories that subvert conventional narrative forms by employing Indian lore (from Hindu to Sufi), Gaelic fable, and historical legend. These are impossible tales, dreaming yet mired in the everyday grit of ordinary life, and told so beautifully that the beginnings and endings of reality and imagination disappear. In "Possession at the Tomb of Sayyed Pir Hazrat Baba Bahadur Saheed Rah Aleh," a tomb is opened on Thursdays to women possessed by spirits; a young boy, Nanak, helps his bewitched mother with her particular spirit's demand by journeying across town to fetch a salty lassi with plenty of pepper and mint. In "Bolero," Felix and his grandfather, Aitor, play violin and piano throughout a World War II air strike, and in "Twang (Release)," a young girl living in the woods amid wild fox and birch finds her way to the shore, ending up adrift for months in the ocean with the first (and only) man she sees. Spare, fierce, and absolutely unpredictable, Where the Long Grass Bends is a delight of invention and language. Easy to hold onto but impossible to pin down, each story is an act of surrender, a folkloric revision similar to the achievements of Salman Rushdie, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Angela Carter, but unlike anything you'll ever read.
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.
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