Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

A Study Guide for Chitra Banarjee Divakaruni's "The Disappearance"
A Study Guide for Chitra Banarjee Divakaruni's "The Disappearance"
A Study Guide for Chitra Banarjee Divakaruni's "The Disappearance"
Ebook45 pages28 minutes

A Study Guide for Chitra Banarjee Divakaruni's "The Disappearance"

By Gale and Cengage

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars

()

Read preview

About this ebook

A Study Guide for Chitra Banarjee Divakaruni's "The Disappearance," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJul 27, 2016
ISBN9781535836265
A Study Guide for Chitra Banarjee Divakaruni's "The Disappearance"

Read more from Gale

Related to A Study Guide for Chitra Banarjee Divakaruni's "The Disappearance"

Related ebooks

Literary Criticism For You

View More

Related articles

Reviews for A Study Guide for Chitra Banarjee Divakaruni's "The Disappearance"

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars
0 ratings

0 ratings0 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

    Book preview

    A Study Guide for Chitra Banarjee Divakaruni's "The Disappearance" - Gale

    12

    The Disappearance

    Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

    1995

    Introduction

    The Disappearance is a short story in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's first fiction collection, the award-winning Arranged Marriage, which was published by Anchor Books in 1995. The story concerns an unnamed woman, the mother of a toddler son, who seemingly vanishes without a trace one day from her suburban California home, leaving her husband (also unnamed) dumbfounded. His much-delayed realization that his wife's disappearance was planned is the culmination of this brief story's exploration of the cultural dissonance inherent in the lives of recent Indian immigrants to the United States. The story explores themes common to much of Divakaruni's work, including gender roles, female independence, and tradition.

    Author Biography

    Divakaruni is a writer of novels, stories, poetry, and nonfiction, most of which explore the modern Indian immigrant experience in the United States. She was born on July 29, 1956, in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India, the second of four children—and the only girl—of Rajendra, an accountant, and Tatini, a teacher. After receiving her BA degree in English from the University of Calcutta in 1976, she moved to the United States to continue her studies. She received an MA from Wright State University in Ohio in 1978 and her PhD in English from the University of California at Berkeley in 1984. She married Murthy Divakaruni, an engineer, in 1979, and the couple has two sons, Anand and Abhay.

    Early in her career, Divakaruni taught English at Foothills College in Los Altos, California, and had no intention of becoming a fiction writer. But when her grandfather in India passed away and she was unable to attend the funeral, she began to feel the need to express her creative side. She started writing poetry; her first collections of poetry were published by Calyx Books, an independent press in Oregon. Soon, she found her subjects taking on narrative lives of their own and switched to short fiction, which allowed her to explore their stories in depth. To hone her craft, she took an evening creative writing class at Foothills, where many of the stories in Arranged Marriage began as assignments. Unbeknown to Divakaruni, her instructor mailed several of these stories to an agent in New York, who sold them to a publisher. Divakaruni's career as an author was under way even before she knew what was happening.

    Published in 1995, Arranged Marriage, which featured The Disappearance, garnered good reviews and several awards. The collection won the 1996 American Book Award, assuring the author that her next work would find an eager audience. Indeed, The Mistress of Spices, Divakaruni's first novel, became a bestseller. It concerns an Indian woman who learns the mysterious and magical art of treating conditions of the human heart with spices. She is sent to

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1