This anthology of critical essays examines the major aspects of Anita Desai’s fiction. The first two essays, both by the author under study, reflect on what the writing process means to her and why she writes in English, as well as recall some of the manifold facets of her itinerant life. The other 14 essays which include one interview, all by discerning scholars from across the globe, interrogate the defining features of Desai’s oeuvre: the range of her characters and locations imbued with multi-cultural and cross-cultural experiences, the situations of an unrelenting pull between her protogonist’s personal spaces and his/her familial or social milieu, the introverted fiction of emotional conflicts she writes about, and the question of women’s resistance to the constrictive spaces assigned to them by a patriarchal society. Incisive and illuminating, the insights in this volume on Desai’s writing career constitute a delightful and refreshing reading.

Devindra Kohli studied at the Universities of Panjab and Delhi in India, and Leeds in the U.K. He was Professor of English at the University of Kashmir, Srinagar (1986-2000). He has been a Visiting Professor at various universities in Germany, including universities of Frankfurt, Bonn, and Munich. His publications include Kamala Das (1975), Indian Writers at Work (ed.1991), Contemporary Indian Short Stories (co-ed. with Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp, 2006), and numerous papers on nineteenth and twentieth century British, American, and Postcolonial literatures.

Melanie Maria Just studied at the Universities of Oxford and Muenster, Germany. She has published in the areas of 18th-century English literature, as well as Colonial and Postcolonial literatures. After teaching assignments at the Universities of Bonn and Muenster, she now teaches English at the Federal Language Agency of Germany.

Contributors : Anita Desai, Corinne Demas , Radha Chakravarty, Harveen Sachdeva Mann, Vasant A Shahane, Ellen Dengel-Janic, Rajeswari Mohan , Aritha van Herk, Viney Kirpal, Sharmila Sen, Judie Newman , Chandra Chatterjee ,Minoli Salgado, Devindra Kohli, Melanie Maria Just.