Having lived under and outlasted two globe-girdling empires, the Portuguese and the British, Victor Rangel-Ribeiro considers himself to be a pre-postcolonial writer, one of the last survivors of a dying breed. His new volume of short fiction includes 15 stories plucked from a long and illustrious career that began in the early 1940s, and is still ongoing. Seven stories deal with life in India; seven with the immigrant experience in New York. The fifteenth, "Dear J.C.," takes us back twenty one centuries, to a Roman colony at the time of Cesar Augustus and Herod the Great. The collection thus spans continents and lifestyles as well as centuries. Although several stories share a common thread, no two stories are alike. Love features in some-from lust to self-delusion to poignant loss in the novella, Loving Ayesha. Other stories contrast the innocence of youth with the problems of old age. A number are very funny. In this collection, Victor Rangel-Ribeiro embraces a unique range of subjects, moods, and emotions, a diversity that reveals a master of story telling.
About the Author: Victor Rangel-Ribeiro was born in Goa, India, in 1925, when it was still a Portuguese colony, but he moved to Bombay in British India to complete his university studies, before moving to the United States in 1956 and becoming an American citizen. Having outlived two empires, the Portuguese and the British, at age 91 he now claims to be one of a vanishing breed of pre-postcolonial writers: His earliest stories appeared in print in colonial Bombay in the 1940s; he is still writing today, often far into the night. Rangel-Ribeiro's short fiction has appeared in such prestigious literary magazines as the Iowa Review, the North American Review, and The Literary Review, and also in his native India. His debut novel, Tivolem, set in Goa in 1933, won Milkweed's National Fiction Prize and was declared by Booklist to be one of the twenty best first novels of 1997-98. Loving Ayesha, a short story collection, was published by Harper Collins (India) in 2003. Both Tivolem and Loving Ayesha made that country's best seller list. Rangel-Ribeiro writes with equal facility of life in colonial times in India, and life in the United States from the immigrant point of view. This explains why half of the stories in this book are based in India, spanning life in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, and the other half deal with the immigrant experience in the United States. To the fourteen stories split equally between India and the United States, we have added a fifteenth. "Dear J. C." is set in a far earlier time, when the Roman Empire was the land of opportunity. In this story, an Israeli-Roman firm of ambitious career counsellors tries to lure a rising young prophet into joining their roster of clients. Rangel-Ribeiro's interests include a life-long involvement in music. His music criticism appeared in the New York Times in the 234 late 1950s. In the 1960s he ran a music antiquariat in New York City specializing in classical music. In 1977 he was appointed Music Director of the Beethoven Society in New York, and in three years steered that young organization to membership in the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. He has several books on music to his credit. He is currently working on a second novel, The Fires of Gangapur.