A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers--a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village--will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future. ~review

About the Author

Born in Bombay in 1952, Rohinton Mistry immigrated to Canada in 1975.  He began writing stories in 1983 while attending the University of Toronto.   Rohinton Mistry's first novel, Such a Long Journey, creates a vivid picture of Indian family life and culture as well as tells a story rich in subject matter, characterization and symbolism. It is set in 1971 Bombay, when India went to war over what was later to become Bangladesh.  Such a Long Journey was made into a movie in 2000, starring Om Puri and Roshan Seth. 

A Fine Balance won the L.A. Times Book Award for Fiction, the Commonwealth Writer's Prize, Canada's prestigious Giller Prize and was a 1996 Booker Prize Finalist.

A Look Inside Bombay

India is known as the home of the vasectomy, with the Indian government claiming to have performed the most amount of vasectomies, than any other nation. In 1973 over 7 million vasectomies were performed in India due to cash initiative schemes. In the Gorakhpur vasectomy camp in India in 1972 there were at least fourteen cases of tetanus infection. This led to the first reported deaths due to vasectomy - eight of them were described in the Times of India. ~website

The train stations in Bombay are crowded…One needs to be physically fit to do the daily commute by train. People travel hanging out of trains, sitting on top of trains, and there are casualties every day." 

The problem of homelessness is worse now than in 1975, because the population has almost doubled. There must be twice as many people living on pavements, in slums and in rudimentary dwellings.

The Little Children by Tom Perotta

Tom Perrotta's thirty-ish parents of young children are a varied and surprising bunch. There's Todd, the handsome stay-at-home dad dubbed "The Prom King" by the moms of the playground; Sarah, a lapsed feminist with a bisexual past, who seems to have stumbled into a traditional marriage; Richard, Sarah's husband, who has found himself more and more involved with a fantasy life on the internet than with the flesh and blood in his own house; and Mary Ann, who thinks she has it all figured out, down to scheduling a weekly roll in the hay with her husband, every Tuesday at 9pm. They all raise their kids in the kind of sleepy American suburb where nothing ever seems to happen-at least until one eventful summer, when a convicted child molester moves back to town, and two restless parents begin an affair that goes further than either of them could have imagined. Unexpectedly suspenseful, but written with all the fluency and dark humor of Perrotta's previous novels, Little Children exposes the adult dramas unfolding amidst the swingsets and slides of an ordinary American playground.  ~review

About the Author

Tom Perrotta is a novelist and short story writer whose work explores the adolescent experience.  Perrotta grew up in New Jersey and currently lives outside Boston. He received his B.A. in English from Yale University and his M.A. in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. He has taught writing at Yale University and Harvard University.  He is also the author of Joe College and Election: A Novel, a satirical, funny story about a suburban New Jersey high school election gone haywire that became an acclaimed Paramount movie starring Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon.  

-A remarkably astute observer of youth culture, Perrotta has been called "a writer to watch" by The Washington Times.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

To call Middlesex a coming-of-age novel about a hermaphrodite would be like calling The Odyssey a story about some guy on a boat. Middlesex is nothing short of epic; one family's survival on a twisted path through Greece to 20th Century America; battles ranging from the fires of the Turkish wars, the igniting of Michigan race riots, and the burning desires hidden within a girl named Callie and the man named Cal who she is to become.  ~review

Interview with Author

I've known Jeffrey Eugenides for several years and in several contexts — first as one of his readers, then as a student of his at Princeton, and now as a friend. From the beginning of his novel The Virgin Suicides to the end of his most recent email, I've always been enamored of how vivid Jeff's mind is and how clearly he seems to know what it is he wants to say. All of which made me excited not only to have an early look at his forthcoming novel Middlesex but to hear some of his ideas in this more formal context about writing and life. 

In The Virgin Suicides, the narrative voice was a first-person-plural "we." Middlesex is told by a hermaphrodite who was raised as a girl and later started living as a male. Obviously you like to complicate the narrative voices in your fiction. Voices you don't hear every day. The "we" voice in The Virgin Suicides came easily, however. It was the first thing I had, really. The first paragraph was told by this collective narrator and the book grew from that. With Middlesex, it was different. I had a story in mind but I didn't have the right voice to tell it with. The voice had to be elastic enough to narrate the epic stuff, the third-person material, and it had to be a highly individualized first-person voice, too.

For a long time I didn't believe what I was writing, but then I gave Cal permission to zigzag between first and third person, and then I did believe it. A lot of time passed while I was screwing around with all this, but then I finally had my starting point. All I had to do was write another 530 pages. ~by Jonathan Safran Foer

Hermaphroditus

In The Greek Myths by Robert Graves, the god Hermaphroditus is "a double-sexed being ... with womanish breasts and long hair." Classicists gush that he/she was as handsome as his father (Hermes) and as beautiful as his mother (Aphrodite). One assumes that this mythic model would render the Greeks benevolent to their double-gendered offspring, but no... They invariably destroyed them at birth, as the Romans later did. Two-to-three people out of every one thousand are born hermaphroditic (claims Robert Edgerton's 1964 study published in American Anthropologist), and almost every culture tries to "fix" this minority. 

Madame Secretary by Madeleine Albright

In winding up her far-ranging autobiography, Madeleine Albright tells us with amusement that once, after leaving office as U.S. Secretary of State, she was mistaken in public for Margaret Thatcher. They both reached the highest rank ever attained by a woman in their respective democratic governments. Were fiercely partisan political figures, and held very strong opinions and were never afraid to battle for them.

Albright is best known for serving as U.S. ambassador to the UN in the first Clinton term, and as Secretary of State in the second. The other thing about Albright that most people will recall is that only after she became Secretary of State did she learn that her family ancestry was Jewish --- that three of her grandparents had died in Nazi concentration camps. 

Her life, though unsettled due to wartime exigencies, was not a rags-to-riches tale. She was born Marie Jana Korbel in Prague into a comfortably situated family. Her father was a respected Czech diplomat and college professor. Fleeing the Nazis, the family spent time in England during World War II. They arrived in the United States when she was 11, and her father took a teaching job in Denver. She entered Wellesley College in 1955 and became an American citizen two years later. She married into a wealthy and well-connected American family in 1959. Her first political idol and mentor was Edmund Muskie, in whose doomed presidential campaign she took part. After the breakup of her marriage, her career in government and politics took off during the Carter presidency, her only personal setback being a painful divorce in 1983. ~reviewed by Robert Finn 

Madame Albright Quotes 

"All women kind of feel that every day they have to do a superior job." 

"Because in some way or another, by somebody, I am reminded of the fact that I'm a woman in a man's world.” 

"I like being a woman and I figure I use everything I have.”

"I'm pretty spontaneous. And I think it's taken me 63 years, but I know who I am." 

"I literally have, sometimes, this out of body experience, just thinking, well Madeleine Albright is a person," Albright says, "who is secretary of state." 

"And then there is the person who comes home from work, ...and nobody would believe this but I go and I put on my flannel nightgown, have cottage cheese, and go and watch television. And that's Madeleine." 

"I love makeup and I need it tonight...because I just got off the plane.”