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Shortlisted for the 2011 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize
2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize Nominee
Longlisted for the Frank O'Connor Short Story Award
"Clark Blaise’s brilliantly imagined The Meagre Tarmac is a novel in short-story form, warmly intimate, startling in its quick jumps and revelations, a portrait of individuals for whom we come to care deeply – and a portrait of an Indo-American way of life that shimmers before our eyes with the rich and compelling detail for which Clark Blaise’s fiction is renowned .… The Meagre Tarmac is a remarkable accomplishment."—Joyce Carol Oates
An Indo-American Canterbury Tales, The Meagre Tarmac explores the places where tradition, innovation, culture, and power meet with explosive force. It begins with Vivek Waldekar, who refused to attend his father’s funeral because he was “trying to please an American girl who thought starting a fire in his father’s body too gross a sacrilege to contemplate.” It ends with Pranab Dasgupta, the Rockefeller of India, who can only describe himself as “‘a very lonely, very rich, very guilty immigrant.’” And in between is a cluster of remarkable characters, incensed by the conflict between personal desire and responsibility, who exhaust themselves in pursuit of the miraculous. Fearless and ferociously intelligent, these stories are vintage Blaise, whose outsider’s view of the changing heart of America has always been ruthless and moving and tender.
Praise for Clark Blaise
Award Recipient from the Academy of Arts & Letters
Officer of the Order of Canada
“The elegant stories in The Meagre Tarmac constitute a warning of sorts … the old tables are turning.”—Margaret Atwood, The New York Review of Books
"Blaise is probably the greatest living Canadian writer most Canadians have never heard of."
—Quill & Quire
"On the leading edge of world literature."
—John Barber, Globe and Mail
"The Meagre Tarmac is a naked instance of appropriation of voice—a literary felony justified in this case by the results."
—Philip Marchand, National Post
"Not to be forgotten ... is Clark Blaise's collection The Meagre Tarmac, wherein a writer's writer excelled himself and got more attention than he has received in a long time, though still not as much as he deserves."—Ian McGillis, Gazette
"You know it's going to be a stellar year for fiction when Clark Blaise publishes something. The Meagre Tarmac ... demonstrates yet again that Blaise is one of the continent's master authors."—Uptown
"What holds the collection together is Blaise's mastery of the short story, his ability to give us a whole personality and the sensuous particularity of lived experiences in a handful of pages."
—Steven Hayward, Globe and Mail
"Blaise meticulously conveys a sense of connection and isolation in the lives of Indian immigrants who are detached from their former lives and country, 'untethered to any earth,' and yet are shape and guided by that absence ... Such connection is beautifully contrasted by the way the opening stories fracture a single family's narrative into multiple perspectives, illustrating the divide that separates people from one another and rendering it more tangible than any geographical border. In the end, The Meagre Tarmac is like a slow exclamation caught halfway between a sigh and laughter, between hope and despair, connection and dissonance."—Canadian Literature
Clark Blaise (1940-), Canadian and American, is the author of 20 books of fiction and nonfiction. A longtime advocate for the literary arts in North America, Blaise has taught writing and literature at Emory, Skidmore, Columbia, NYU, Sir George Williams, UC-Berkeley, SUNY-Stony Brook, and the David Thompson University Centre. In 1968, he founded the postgraduate Creative Writing Program at Concordia University; he after went on to serve as the Director of the International Writing Program at Iowa (1990-1998), and as President of the Society for the Study of the Short Story (2002-present). Internationally recognized for his contributions to the field, Blaise has received an Arts and Letters Award for Literature from the American Academy (2003), and in 2010 was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. Blaise now divides his time between New York and San Francisco, where he lives with his wife, American novelist Bharati Mukherjee.
Contents
The Sociology of Love 7
In Her Prime 21
The Dimple Kapadia of Camino Real 34
Dear Abhi 44
Brewing Tea in the Dark
The Quality of Life 71
A Connie da Cunha Book 88
Waiting for Romesh 103
Potsy and Pansy 114
Isfahan 135
Man and Boy 150