Debi Milligan photo |
Rishi Reddi
Winner of the 2008 Pen/L.L. Winship Award
The Spice Valley
Ecco Press, 2009
Karma and Other Stories
Ecco Press, 2007
Rishi Reddi was born in Hyderabad, India, and grew up in the United Kingdom and the United States. She graduated from Swarthmore College in 1988 and Northeastern University School of Law in 1992. She has been an enforcement attorney for the state and federal environmental protection agencies, as well as a lawyer for the Massachusetts Secretary of Environment. Her short stories have appeared in Harvard Review, Louisville Review and Prairie Schooner, and her English translation of Telugu short fiction has appeared in Partisan Review. Her work will be featured in Best American Short Stories 2005 and has won an Individual Artist’s Grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She lives in Brookline.
"A startlingly mature collection....Reddi's understated prose and her choice of detail give her revelations a quiet power."
-The New Yorker
"Reddi deftly employs images to crystallize them: a set of red glass bracelets smashed with a rock, a wounded bird confused by Boston's sky-scrapers, even a bean-and-cheese burrito, all call to mind the isolation and occasional bewilderment shared by her sympathetic characters."
-Publisher's Weekly
"An excellent debut collection....For fans of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake but also for fans of F. Scott Fitzgerald's elegant studies of a culture that is both familiar and foreign."
-Booklist
"Reddi's voice is gentle, her eye is watchful, and the dilemmas of her often-isolated characters are by no means solely those of the immigrant community. A soft-spoken, sympathetic collection."
-Kirkus Reviews
"A marvelous balancing act between bathos and pathos. Among such time-tested topics of immigrant fiction, Reddi soars."
-The San Francisco Chronicle
"A moving study of characters finding self, purpose, and place....Reddi has produced a piece of writing that masterfully contrasts the assumed with the experienced, myth with reality."
-India Currents
"In deceptively simple prose, [Reddi] gives us a compassionate look at what happens when the insular world of the Indian immigrant is breached."
-St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"[Reddi] has burrowed so deeply into the lives of her characters as to make them not only real individuals but very memorable and sympathetic ones. It is a most impressive achievement."
-Arthur Golden, bestselling author of Memoirs of a Geisha
"These stories have a stillness and clarity of language that allow immediate closeness to the emotional lives of the characters....Sad, sweet, tender--a truly lovely book."
-Kiran Desai, Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Inheritance of Loss
"Reddi's characters are complicated people: lonely, prideful, loving, lost, and, as are the stories they inhabit, memorable and very worthy of our attention. Exquisite."
-Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of An Almost Perfect Moment
"Rishi Reddi has written a unique and beautiful book with the power to both entertain and educate. The reader is left to ponder whether making up one's mind--and heart--to be free is a decision that can transcend both custom and country."
-Judith Guest, bestselling author of Ordinary People
