What is Nalini Jones reading?

The latest featured contributor to Writers Read: Nalini Jones, author of What You Call Winter.

One paragraph from her entry:

I’ve recently finished Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, a strange and haunting novel about two sisters growing up near a lake in which both their mother and their grandfather have been lost. Her sentences have the clarity of lake water, cold and pure and perfect, and I was dazzled by the descriptions. I had barely finished Elisa Albert’s novel, The Book of Dahlia, before pressing it on several friends; the book is bold, funny, ruthless, and heart-breaking. The final lines leave me aching still. And in Greece, I picked up a book I reread every summer, Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love, out of sheer fondness for The Bolter and the surprise, every time, of her final remarks. [read on]

Nalini Jones graduated from Amherst College, and received an M.F.A. from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in the Ontario Review, Glimmer Train, Dogwood, and Creative Nonfiction's "Living Issue." Her first book, What You Call Winter, is a collection of interconnected stories.

Among the praise for What You Call Winter:

"Nalini Jones stories twine round each other in a rich exploration of time and place, in a particular town, Santa Clara, in post-colonial India. The family in What You Call Winter is devout in its Catholic heritage, its culture within their country’s culture carried on in English. The reader may have a sense that we’ve not been here before, but perhaps we have for Jones’ beautifully crafted stories recall Chekov’s plays with their moving portrayal of the sorrows and steady belief of those who stay; the trials and accommodations of those who go away. At times the visits back to India are heartbreaking in their revelations; at other times amusing in their presumption of the better life abroad. Much like Eudora Welty’s extraordinary collection of stories, The Golden Apples, time unfolds in these stories from the Edenic garden of childhood to the broken lives and the salvaged hopes of those who endure."
-–Maureen Howard

Read an excerpt from What You Call Winter, and learn more about the author and her work at Nalini Jones' website.

Writers Read: Nalini Jones.

--Marshal Zeringue