Join us for a great conversation between local authors Doris Iarovici and Rishi Reddi about Doris' new short story book, Minus One! Click here to register for this Zoom webinar.
About Minus One:
By turns wrenching, transcendent, and haunting, the rich stories in Minus One follow characters whose lives are upended by death, estrangement, and loss—and the ways they must negotiate loneliness and absence to rebuild their new realities. In intimate portraits, a psychiatrist analyzes the missed signs of her stepson’s dangerous addiction, a resentful boy seeks revenge against his stepmother, a surgeon confronts his failed marriages, an artist searches for a new identity in widowhood, and a young dancer plots to escape a manipulative older partner.
Woven through this slim and powerful volume are astute observations on how pain and grief can be inherited from one generation to the next. With tenderness and honesty, Doris Iarovici explores the plunging depths of the human experience, lingering on moments of familial warmth and joy but never shying away from conflict and tension. These stories reveal glimmers of hope and possibility, even in our darkest times.
Doris Iarovici is the author of American Dreaming and Other Stories. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, The Guardian, and Crab Orchard Review. She works as a psychiatrist at Harvard University.
About Passage West:
A Recommended Book from:
Teen Vogue * Bustle * Book Riot * The Millions
A sweeping, vibrant first novel following a family of Indian sharecroppers at the onset of World War I, revealing a little-known part of California history
1914: Ram Singh arrives in the Imperial Valley on the Mexican border, reluctantly accepting his friend Karak’s offer of work and partnership in a small cantaloupe farm. Ram is unmoored; fleeing violence in Oregon, he desperately longs to return to his wife and newborn son in Punjab—but he is duty bound to make his fortune first.
In the Valley, American settlement is still new and the rules are ever shifting. Alongside Karak; Jivan and his wife, Kishen; and Amarjeet, a U.S. soldier, Ram struggles to farm in the unforgiving desert. When he meets an alluring woman who has fought in Mexico’s revolution, he strives to stay true to his wife. The Valley is full of settlers hailing from other cities and different continents. The stakes are high and times are desperate—just one bad harvest or stolen crop could destabilize a family. And as anti- immigrant sentiment rises among white residents, the tensions of life in the west finally boil over.
In her ambitious debut novel, Rishi Reddi, award-winning author of Karma and Other Stories, explores an enduring question: Who is welcome in America? Richly imagined and beautifully rendered, Passage West offers a moving portrait of one man’s search for home.
Rishi Reddi is the author of the collection Karma and Other Stories, which received the 2008 L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award for fiction. Her work appears in Best American Short Stories, has been broadcast on National Public Radio, and was chosen for honorable mention in the Pushcart Prize. She was born in Hyderabad, India, and grew up in Great Britain and the United States. She lives in Cambridge, MA.
By turns wrenching, transcendent, and haunting, the rich stories in Minus One follow characters whose lives are upended by death, estrangement, and loss—and the ways they must negotiate loneliness and absence to rebuild their new realities.
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“Expansive, moving, and deeply powerful, Passage West explores an important and overlooked chapter in our national history and is a refreshingly honest novel about the people who gave everything to this country but were often overlooked and traumatized by the very nation to which they contributed so greatly."-- Marjan Kamali, author of