In this extraordinary novel in letters, an Indian immigrant girl in New York City and a Kentucky coal miner's son find strength and perspective by sharing their true selves across the miles. Meena and River have a lot in common: fathers forced to work away from home to make ends meet, grandmothers who mean the world to them, and faithful dogs. But Meena is an Indian immigrant girl living in New York City’s Chinatown, while River is a Kentucky coal miner’s son. As Meena’s family studies for citizenship exams and River’s town faces devastating mountaintop removal, this unlikely pair become pen pals, sharing thoughts and, as their camaraderie deepens, discovering common ground in their disparate experiences. With honesty and humor, Meena and River bridge the miles between them, creating a friendship that inspires bravery and defeats cultural misconceptions. Narrated in two voices, each voice distinctly articulated by a separate gifted author, this chronicle of two lives powerfully conveys the great value of being and having a friend and the joys of opening our lives to others who live beneath the same sun.

Same Sun Here

Children's Books

House, Silas

Vaswani, Neela

Growing Up & Facts of Life

CANDLEWICK PRESS +

“Even better than reading a refreshingly honest story by one talented writer is reading one by two such writers.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review) Pen pals Meena and River have a lot in common: fathers forced to work away from home to make ends meet, grandmothers who mean the world to them, and faithful dogs. But Meena is an Indian immigrant girl living in New York City’s Chinatown, while River is a Kentucky coal miner’s son. With honesty and humor, Meena and River (each voice distinctly articulated by a separate gifted author) bridge the miles between them, creating a friendship that inspires bravery and defeats cultural misconceptions.

Candlewick

It’s not what you look at, it’s what you see! Take a journey through New York City as it might be seen by a child through a camera lens. Shapes, colors, patterns, and people are everywhere, and things look different depending on how you look at them — and who is doing the looking. In this playful ode to photography and point of view, a poetic story posits how one young girl might capture moments of insight, community, and art in her beloved hometown, New York City. With the popularity of camera phones, photo-journaling, and photo-posting sites, this fictional exploration of photography as one young girl’s form of self-expression is guaranteed to appeal to budding photographers.

This Is My Eye: A New York Story

Arts, Music & Photography

Meena and River have a lot in common: fathers forced to work away from home to make ends meet, grandmothers who mean the world to them, and faithful dogs. But Meena is an Indian immigrant girl living in New York City’s Chinatown, while River is a Kentucky coal miner’s son. As Meena’s family studies for citizenship exams and River’s town faces devastating mountaintop removal, this unlikely pair become pen pals, sharing thoughts and, as their camaraderie deepens, discovering common ground in their disparate experiences. With honesty and humor, Meena and River bridge the miles between them, creating a friendship that inspires bravery and defeats cultural misconceptions. Narrated in two voices, each voice distinctly articulated by a separate gifted author, this chronicle of two lives powerfully conveys the great value of being and having a friend and the joys of opening our lives to others who live beneath the same sun.

Candlewick on Brilliance Audio

Meena and River have a lot in common: fathers forced to work away from home to make ends meet, grandmothers who mean the world to them, and faithful dogs. But Meena is an Indian immigrant girl living in New York City’s Chinatown, while River is a Kentucky coal miner’s son. As Meena’s family studies for citizenship exams and River’s town faces devastating mountaintop removal, this unlikely pair become pen pals, sharing thoughts and, as their camaraderie deepens, discovering common ground in their disparate experiences. With honesty and humor, Meena and River bridge the miles between them, creating a friendship that inspires bravery and defeats cultural misconceptions. Narrated in two voices, each voice distinctly articulated by a separate gifted author, this chronicle of two lives powerfully conveys the great value of being and having a friend and the joys of opening our lives to others who live beneath the same sun.

Meena and River have a lot in common: fathers forced to work away from home to make ends meet, grandmothers who mean the world to them, and faithful dogs. But Meena is an Indian immigrant girl living in New York City's Chinatown, while River is a Kentucky coal miner's son. As Meena's family studies for citizenship exams and River's town faces devastating mountaintop removal, this unlikely pair become pen pals, sharing thoughts and, as their camaraderie deepens, discovering common ground in their disparate experiences. With honesty and humor, Meena and River bridge the miles between them, creating a friendship that inspires bravery and defeats cultural misconceptions. Narrated in two voices, each voice distinctly articulated by a separate gifted author, this chronicle of two lives powerfully conveys the great value of being and having a friend and the joys of opening our lives to others who live beneath the same sun.

"Fierce and bold, these beautiful stories provide a highly kinetic exploration of sameness and difference in terms of ethnic and racial origin. Through a romp of language—vital, outrageous, unpredictable—the fireworks of Neela Vaswani’s original genius cast shadows and illumine psyches that conventional monovisions never perceive. The stories of Where the Long Grass Bends are for readers willing to view the shape-shifting of both reality and literary form. Vaswani’s characters embrace their fates through such rigorous birthing that what has been internal finally contains and defines them."—Sena Jeter Naslund
"If it is true, as one of Vaswani’s characters claims, that a musical movement is the equivalent of a sentence, then the stories in Where the Long Grass Bends comprise an uncanny and beautiful symphony. This is a luminous collection, where each fiction evolves its own mythology. I want to live in the world of these stories just as I am afraid of this beautiful and often dark world. Neela Vaswani’s Where the Long Grass Bends is lovely, strange, lyrical, full of true mystery."—Victoria Redel
Where the Long Grass Bends is a delight of invention and language. In whirling, catch-me-if-you-can prose, Vaswani tells stories that subvert conventional narrative by employing Indian lore, Gaelic fable, and historical legend. Spare, fierce, and unpredictable, this debut collection is boundless, even boundary-less, because Vaswani has, as David Garnett said of Virginia Woolf, a mind that sticks to nothing.
Neela Vaswani lives in New York. Her short stories have appeared in numerous journals, including Prairie Schooner, American Literary Review, and Global City Review. In 1999, she was awarded the Italo Calvino Prize. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland, and teaches in the Master of Fine Arts in Writing program at Spalding University.

Where The Long Grass Bends: Stories

Literature & Fiction

United States

Sarabande Books

2010 ForeWord Book of the Year, Essay Silver Medalist, 2011 IPPY Awards in Multi-Cultural Adult Fiction 2011 American Book Award 
Vaswani is a confident writer whose unflinching eye shows the reader the beauty grounded in the mundane.”San Francisco Chronicle
Vaswani’s voice is witty, sharp, innovative, unique.”Chitra Banerjee
You Have Given Me a Country is an emotionally powerful exploration of blurred borders, identity, and what it means to be multicultural. Combining memoir, history, and fiction, the book follows the paths of the author's Irish-Catholic mother and Sindhi-Indian father on their journey toward each other and the biracial child they create. Neela Vaswani's second full-length work thematically echoes such books as The Color of Water, Running in the Family, or Motiba's Tatoos, but it is entirely unique in approach, voice, and story. The book reveals the self as a culmination of all that went before it, a brilliant new weave of two varied, yet ultimately universal backgrounds that spans continents, generations, languages, wars, and, at the center of it all, family.
Neela Vaswani is the author of the short story collection Where the Long Grass Bends (Sarabande Books, 2004). Recipient of a 2006 O. Henry Prize, her fiction and nonfiction have been widely anthologized and published in journals such as Epoch, Shenandoah, and Prairie Schooner. She lives in New York City.

You Have Given Me a Country: A Memoir

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Vaswani, Neela. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Vaswani, Neela

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Vaswani, Neela. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Same Sun Here

Same Sun Here

This Is My Eye: A New York Story

Same Sun Here

Same Sun Here

Same Sun Here

Same Sun Here

Where The Long Grass Bends: Stories

You Have Given Me a Country: A Memoir