Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Desai, Anita (Vol. 175) - Shyamala A. Narayan (review date winter 2001)

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Shyamala A. Narayan (review date winter 2001)

SOURCE: Narayan, Shyamala A. Review of Diamond Dust: Stories, by Anita Desai. World Literature Today 75, no. 1 (winter 2001): 104-05.

[In the following review, Narayan prefers the stories set abroad in Diamond Dust to those set in India, objecting to the latter's discomfiting perspective on contemporary Indian society and inappropriate use of Indian idiom.]

Author of ten novels, including Fasting, Feasting (1999; see WLT 74:1, p. 240), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Anita Desai is also a short-story writer. The stories in Diamond Dust, her second collection, are quite different from those in Games at Twilight and Other Stories (1978), her first collection. The earlier stories were set entirely in India, but three of the nine stories here are about life in the USA, while one is set in Mexico. The stories set abroad are better than the...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Seema Jena (essay date 1989)
   2. Bharati A. Parikh (essay date summer 1993)
   3. Pippa Brush (essay date 1996)
   4. Minoli Salgado (essay date summer 1996)
   5. Rajeswari Mohan (essay date 1997)
   6. Uma Parameswaran (review date winter 1997)
   7. Katharine Capshaw Smith (essay date April 1997)
   8. Tony Simoes da Silva (essay date July 1997)
   9. Gabriele Annan (review date 27 May 1999)
   10. Shirley Chew (review date 28 May 1999)
   11. Frederick Luis Aldama (review date winter 2000)
   12. Sarah Curtis (review date 26 May 2000)
   13. Shyamala A. Narayan (review date winter 2001)
   14. Robin Gerster (review date 12 January 2002)
   15. Cindy Lacom (essay date fall 2002)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright