Twelve stories of immigrants who navigate the ancestral past of India as they remake their lives—and themselves—in North America. These are stories of fluid and broken identities, discarded languages and deities, and the attempt to create bonds with a new community against the ever-present fear of failure and betrayal.
“The narrative of immigration,” Bharati Mukherjee once wrote, “is the epic narrative of this millennium.” Her stories and novels brilliantly add to that ongoing saga. In the story “The Lady from Lucknow,” a woman is pushed to the limit while wanting nothing more than to fit in. In “Hindus,” characters discover that breaking away from a culture has deep and unexpected costs. In “A Father,” the clash of cultures leads a man to an act of terrible violence. “How could he tell these bright, mocking women,” Mukherjee writes, “that in the darkness, he sensed invisible presences: gods and snakes frolicked in the master bedroom, little white sparks of cosmic static crackled up the legs of his pajamas. Something was out there in the dark, something that could invent accidents and coincidences to remind mortals that even in Detroit they were no more than mortal.”
There is light in these stories as well. The collection’s closing story, “Courtly Vision,” brings to life the world within a Mughal miniature painting and describes a light charged with excitement to discover the immense intimacy of darkness. Readers will also discover that excitement, and the many gradations of darkness and light, throughout these pages from the mind of a master storyteller.
Darkness is part of Godine’s Nonpareil series: celebrating the joy of discovery with books bound to be classics.

BHARATI MUKHERJEE is the author of seven novels (most recently Desirable Daughters and The Tree Bride), two collections of short stories (Darkness and The Middleman and Other Stories), and the co-author, with Clark Blaise, of two books of non-fiction (Days and Nights in Calcutta and The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy). She has also written numerous essays on immigration and American culture. She is the first naturalized U.S. citizen to have won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Fiction. She has been a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, since 1989.

Bharati Mukherjee's profile page

Clark Blaise has taught in Montreal, Toronto, Saskatchewan and British Columbia, as well as at Skidmore College, Columbia University, Iowa, NYU, Sarah Lawrence and Emory. For several years he directed the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Among the most widely travelled of authors, he has taught or lectured in Japan, India, Singapore, Australia, Finland, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Holland, Germany, Haiti and Mexico. He lived for years in San Francisco, teaching at the University of California, Berkeley. He is married to the novelist Bharati Mukherjee and currently divides his time between San Francisco and Southampton, Long Island. In 2002, he was elected president of the Society for the Study of the Short Story. In 2003, he was given an award for exceptional achievement by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2009, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada ``for his contributions to Canadian letters as an author, essayist, teacher, and founder of the post-graduate program in creative writing at Concordia University``.

Clark Blaise's profile page

Praise for Bharati Mukherjee and Darkness
“Compassionate and eloquent...Darkness is a great gift to readers.”
—Publishers Weekly
“I was in awe of her short stories and her articulate intelligence. What a light in the literary world she was. Such ​talent, beauty, charm, grace, kindness and calm, a voice of reason—and indignation when it was warranted.”
—Amy Tan, author of Where the Past Begins
“Mukherjee writes in laser-sharp language . . . For readers, writers, immigrants, patriots, and expatriates the world over, Darkness is a study in excellence of a short story’s highest achievement.”
—New York Journal of Books
“These powerful stories have been written with such delicacy. People are displaced, deceived, sometimes disoriented, though in their perseverance, and their inherent dignity, they’re rarely defeated. I’ve long admired Bharati Mukhergee’s stories. Reading these, I was reminded of what a sensuous and tactile writer she is, how willingly she brushes up against the clashing textures of the world.”
—Ann Beattie, author of A Wonderful Stroke of Luck
“While you’re still chuckling over the sneaky humor hidden in exquisitely chosen details, Bharati Mukherjee hits you over the head. And oh my, the blow is always so well-timed. I marvel at the timing, the insight, and the poignance of these stories.”
—Lois Lowry, author of The Giver
“The stories of Bharati Mukherjee are once again—and rightfully so—part of the contemporary literary conversation, posing the questions that continue to shape the American identity. What’s gained and lost in the act of immigration? Which selves are shed and kept and made anew? Few writers have explored the mutual transformation of America and its immigrants with such complexity, wisdom, and heart. Her work has always been vital; now, with the re-issue of Darkness, a new generation of readers will come to know Bharati Mukherjee, one of our great American writers.”
—Lysley Tenorio, author of The Son of Good Fortune
“Bharati Mukherjee’s pitch-perfect stories recalibrate our notion of immigrant literature. These vibrant and ferocious stories paved the way for writing about the Indian-American experience. Mukherjee wrote not from the margins, but from the center, chronicling our nation of immigrants and their narratives. She was the groundbreaking Indian-American writer who led the way for so many other writers to tell their stories, to feel seen. Her storytelling is a revelation, and her intricately crafted stories speak to the universal, to our human frailties. No one tells the diasporic story like she does.
—Nina Swamidoss McConigley, author of Cowboys and East Indians
"These beautiful, tough-minded stories were way ahead of the curve that has led to the recent emergence of literature of the Asian diaspora in North America. Bharati Mukherjee saw then crucial, self-defining, morally complex differences between immigration, expatriation and assimilation that we’re only beginning to perceive now, forty years later. The stories are prophetic. And as literary art, they are like shards of glass. Read them with care, for they will cut you.”
—Russell Banks, author of Foregone
“Bharati Mukherjee is writing achingly compassionate, ravishingly beautiful, absolutely essential books.”
—Robert Olen Butler, author of Late City
“Her prose fiction is masterful, giving us a perspective on a singular life imagined with impeccable care and judgment.”
—Joyce Carol Oates, author of Babysitter
“Mukherjee has emerged as an exemplary author.”
—Washington Post
“With the uncanny third eye of the artist, Mukherjee forces us to see our country anew.”
—USA Today
“Mukherjee writes with beautiful precision . . . neatly needlepointing a malevolent world.”
—Village Voice