This Is Not Your Country by Amin Ahmad won the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize from BkMk Press, selected by Stephanie Powell Watts. America has upended the lives of these Indian immigrants: a doctor addicted to the adrenaline rush of the ER, a genius computer programmer who always gets fired, a high-level bureaucrat outshone by his young wife, a teenage runaway, and a lonely livery driver who befriends a troupe of street acrobats. As they desperately seek solace in love, sex, and status, they discover that the journey to real belonging is much stranger than they had ever imagined.
Stories in This Is Not Your Country have appeared in such places as The Missouri Review, Slice, and Asian American Literary Review.
Amin Ahmad was raised in India, attended Vassar College and MIT, and has lived in Boston, New York, Washington DC, and Chicago. He worked as an architect before turning to fiction and now teaches creative writing at Duke University.
“These powerful stories capture both the hard-won successes and liminal emptiness of life as an outsider. Their characters are educated, savvy, and often brilliant, yet they strain to connect with their communities, jobs, and even their own families.”
—Foreword Reviews
“Within the blur of the globalized world, Ahmad focuses on the “new immigrant”—familiar with many cities, but never at home. A beautiful, vivid collection.”
—Chaitali Sen, author of The Pathless Sky
“Ahmad is interested in dreamers, secret-harborers, country-leavers. They convince us that their world is not right, that much has happened before, that resolution and healing is close by. But Ahmad promises us nothing. Perhaps that is why we should read him, because he makes us want to believe.”
—Deepak Unnikrishnan, author of Temporary People
“The characters in this collection are at turns familiar and fascinating; their circumstances remind us that the human condition is simultaneously global and neighborly. In Ahmad’s capable hands, the past and the future is perilous, prismatic, and joyous.”
—Tarfia Faizullah, author of Seam and Registers of Illuminated Villages
“Ahmad disrupts the standard narrative about India and Indian immigrants. His characters travel unknown territories, both geographically and personally. Urgent, original, and finely composed.”
—Nina McConigley, author of Cowboys and East Indians
Distributed for BkMk Press.
