Where the Long Grass Bends: Stories — Neela Vaswani

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 ofWhere the Long Grass Bendsare 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 inWhere the Long Grass Bendscomprise 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''sWhere the Long Grass Bendsis 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, includingPrairie Schooner, American Literary Review, andGlobal 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.