Video: Stories Book

Indian writer Meera Nair writes with such emotional and descriptive precision that her fiction are surefooted, affecting, immersive, transportive. She writes with fluid prose, but I was more impressed with her collection's wide range of characters: the husband who yearns for a blow-job (his first!), the poor delivery boy enchanted with a customer, the teenager watching as his grandfather loses his land to the Communists, three advertising professionals on a tense vacation in a town developed by the British, a female journalist and her sick father now withering away, an editor and his wife living with both their mothers, the town folks ecstatic over the reported arrival of the President of the United States. So many worlds here. My favorite stories: "Video", "Sixteen Days in Summer", "My Grandfather Dreams of Fences", "A Certain Sense of Place", and "Vishnukumar's Valentine's Day".