Jasmine: 30th anniversary edition - Softcover

Mukherjee, Bharati

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802136303 ISBN 13: 9780802136305

Publisher: Grove Press, 1999

Synopsis

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR
ONE OF TIME’ S “30 BOOKS TO READ BEFORE YOU’RE 30”

“Mukherjee gives us the gift of being allowed to see ourselves in all our inconsistencies . . . To build our hearts so they might always reflect, like Jasmine, what it means to carry what is fraught and scared and dismissive and hopeful and wild inside us, and choose love.” ―Mira Jacob, from the new introduction

When Jasmine was first published the New York Times called it “one of the most suggestive novels we have about what it is to become an American.” Thirty years later, Jasmine has only grown in its significance. Following one woman through her numerous identities ― from Jyoti in a small village in Punjab, to Jasmine in Jalandhar, to Jase in Manhattan, to Jane in Iowa ― Mukherjee gives us an iconic character whose journey through shifting landscapes necessitates her shifting selves. What she encounters on this path, from India to America and from girlhood to womanhood, shows the beauty and darkness and revelation inherent in the journeys of all those who not only want to survive, but to grow.

With a new introduction by Mira Jacob for this thirtieth-anniversary edition, Jasmine is a masterful examination of identity, immigration, and sexuality from the “Matriarch of Indian-American literature.” (Literary Hub)

About this title

About the Author

Mira Jacob is the author and illustrator of Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations. Her critically acclaimed novel, The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing, was a Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers pick, shortlisted for India’s Tata First Literature Award, and longlisted for the Brooklyn Literary Eagles Prize. It was named one of the best books of 2014 by Kirkus Reviews, the Boston Globe, Goodreads, Bustle, and The Millions. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, documentary filmmaker Jed Rothstein, and their son.

From the Back Cover

One of the best-loved novels from a writer of richness and significance, Jasmine has been acclaimed by the Los Angeles Times Book Review as "artful and arresting . . . breath-taking . . . [Mukherjee] marks with unsparing brilliance the symptoms of a new Third World." When Jasmine is suddenly widowed at seventeen, she seems fated to a life of quiet isolation in the small Indian village where she was born. But the force of Jasmine's desires propels her explosively into a larger, more dangerous, and ultimately more life-giving world. In just a few years, Jasmine becomes Jane Ripplemeyer, happily pregnant by a middle-aged Iowa banker and the adoptive mother of a Vietnamese refugee.

Jasmine's metamorphosis, with its sudden upheavals and its slow evolutionary steps, illuminates the making of an American mind; but even more powerfully, her story depicts the shifting contours of an America being transformed by her and others like her-our new neighbors, friends, and lovers. In Jasmine, Bharati Mukherjee has created a heroine as exotic and unexpected as the many worlds in which she lives.

"Rich . . . One of the most suggestive novels we have about what it is to be come an American."-The New York Times Book Review

"Engrossing . . . Mukherjee once again presents all the shock, pain and liberation of exile and transformation. . . . With the uncanny third eye of the artist, Mukherjee forces us to see our country anew."-USA Today

"A fable, a kind of impressionistic prose-poem, about being an exile, a refugee, a spiritual vagabond in the world today; Mukherjee has eloquently succeeded."-The New York Times

"A beautiful novel, poetic, exotic, perfectly controlled."-San Francisco Chronicle Born in Calcutta and now a distinguished professor at the University of California at Berkeley, Bharati Mukherjee was the first naturalized American citizen to win the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, for her book The Middleman and Other Stories. She is also the author of Leave It to Me, The Holder of the World, Darkness, The Tiger's Daughter, and Wife. Bharati Mukherjee lives in San Francisco.

Edition details

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802136303
• ISBN 13: 9780802136305
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 256