Dec 23, 2009

Jasmine | Critical Overview

When Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine was published in 1989, it received wide critical praise in the mass media, but less kind treatment among academic scholars. Mukherjee had just had her greatest success in becoming the first naturalized American citizen to win the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. She won that award in 1988 for The Middleman and Other Stories.

The New York Times Book Review called Jasmine "One of the most suggestive novels we have about what it is to become American." At the year's end, it named the book one of the best of...