Cowboys and East Indians: Stories

WINNER OF THE PEN/OPEN BOOK AWARD AND THE HIGH PLAINS BOOK AWARD ● For readers of Jhumpa Lahiri and Maile Meloy, a collection of stories about Indian immigrants in the rural American West full of “such grace and understated power that you know you are in the presence of an incredible new voice in fiction” (Kevin Wilson, author of Nothing to See Here).

“We were the wrong kind of Indians living in Wyoming. There were Arapaho, Shoshone, even some Crow. And then there were us.”

Richly textured, compassionate, and at times hilarious, Cowboys and East Indians traces a journey from India to Wyoming and back again, introducing us along the way to characters who seem not quite to fit the circumstances in which they find themselves, but who nevertheless search for belonging—through unexpected common ground with their human neighbors or the abiding, if isolating, openness of the vast landscape of the West.

There is the woman newly arrived in Casper, asked by her husband’s cowboy co-worker to help him cross-dress in her saris. The foreign exchange student who succumbs to kleptomania. A young Indian-American woman reckoning with her life in Casper with her white father, following the death of her Indian mother. And the American woman traveling to Chennai in the hopes of scoring discount Accutane for her chronic cystic acne. Seamlessly moving from character to character with empathy and unexpected connection, the stories in Cowboys and East Indians show us the not-often-mentioned rural immigrant experience, communities in which identity is shaped not just by personal history, but by place, the very land on which they must build a home.