Being Here: Stories(University Press of Kentucky New Poetry & Prose)

"We are all now writing stories. Sometimes in memory, sometimes in air. The wind lifts and passes us in gusts. Our stories scatter over continents, camouflaged histories we cannot share."_x000D_ In Being Here, Manini Nayar brings together a finely crafted collection of interconnected stories that follow "the daily miracle" of her characters' inner lives. Nayar brings to the forefront immigrant women making their way in the world as mothers, as wives, as outliers, and as rebels. She writes about their insistence on autonomy, the absurdity of the struggles they face, and their occasional triumphs._x000D_ These stories loop and double back across time and locales, linking characters through memory while illumining lives forever changed by an offhand phrase, an act of will, or an unsought encounter. Readers will meet a wide array of characters, but it is Nina with whom they will become most familiar, as she appears throughout the collection: first, as a young wife brought to the US by her husband, Siddharth Vellodi; second, as an older sister; and third, as a divorced mother whose daughter's fateful rebellion remains the mysterious and incandescent center of the stories. Nayar's exploration of inward lives as the locus of dramatic action and events allows both characters and readers to grapple with simply being. In doing so, Nayar reveals the performative aspects of language—particularly its ability to create, destroy, and heal connections._x000D_ In poetic and eloquent prose, Being Here constructs a luminous collage of restless immigrants united by their shared deference to a brave new journey. In their burgeoning voices another America is found, both latent and radiantly alive.

About the Author :
Manini Nayar is associate teaching professor of English and women's studies at Penn State. She is the recipient of Individual Artist Fellowships in fiction from the Indiana Arts Council and The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Her award-winning stories have been broadcast by the BBC World Service and published in Boston Review, Shenandoah, Bellevue Literary Review, London Magazine, Stand, the Malahat Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review.

Review :

Dazzling. . . . By the end of Being Here, the discrete gossamer threads of Manini Nayar's linked stories have become entangled in our minds, by beautiful design. . . . Though it's presented as a collection, Being Here ends up reading like a generational novel, with twisting strands of DNA. In the Indian immigrant communities Nayar describes, from the Himalayan foothills to Manhattan to South Bend, Ind., connections thin with geographical distance. Nayar tests how far familial relationships can stretch before breaking. . . . With this collection Nayar reveals the invisible details that unite us.

Original, bright, refreshing, with terse sentences and many passages of lyrical prose.

Spanning different continents and communities, this collection of precise and effervescent short stories celebrates the absurd and the everyday, and delights with its humor, passion, and pathos.