The Middleman and Other Stories


The Middleman and Other Stories is a collection of short stories written by Bharati Mukherjee. This book won the 1988 National Book Critics Circle Award.
Stories from this volume are frequently anthologized, particularly Orbiting, A Wife's Story, and The Middleman. The short story Jasmine would later be developed into the 1989 novel Jasmine.

Synopsis

According to Michiko Kakutani, of The New York Times, the characters populating these stories are "all exiles, expatriates, wanderers, people on the move, shucking off old lives as easily as a snake sheds its skin. They are third-world refugees, fleeing poverty and oppression; but they are also Americans moving from coast to coast, small towns to cities, exchanging one partner for another in search of a dream that always seems to elude them. Although they possess a seemingly infinite freedom - the possibility of becoming whatever they want to become — the price of that freedom is rootlessness and dislocation, a feeling of perpetual displacement."

Reception