MAD COUNTRY: Stories

If you see Orwell and Kafka together walking down a street, you are in the world of Samrat Upadhyay's Mad Country. The editor of an investigative magazine contends with the trauma of a disappeared colleague, a political tragedy that vies for her attention with a more domestic crisis: a friend who’s suicidal over a divorce. An American hippie in Kathmandu in the 1980s undergoes a drastic identity change, only to discover that the metamorphosis brings its own heartbreak. A young man forms a bond with an African woman who has inexplicably appeared on the streets of the city. A wealthy Nepali boy—a Richie Rich—finds himself pretending to be a beggar to understand why his mother abandoned him. These eight stories are from the master chronicler of our modern-day anxieties, globalization and exile. Mad Country takes you to places that you have always yearned to go but were always afraid to.

Samrat Upadhyay is the author of Arresting God in Kathmandu, a Whiting Award winner, and The Guru of Love, a New York Times Notable Book and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year. He is the director of the creative writing program at Indiana University.