Iqbal Pittalwala's debut collection focuses on the lives of ordinary
South Asians in contemporary India and in the United States,
giving voice to people who are usually denied a say. The eleven
stories are told from the point of view of young and old, male and
female—characters confronting a chaotic and corrupt society
torn between changing religious and social values, economic
decline, and the encroachment of superficial popular
culture—cinema in particular.
	
     In the epistolary title story, an elderly Indian woman's letter to
Hollywood epitomizes the ironic distance between her Hindu faith
and her addiction to popular film and television: she writes a
rambling missive about many aspects of her long life, including the
fact that she's just met the reincarnation of the actor James Dean in
India. In "Trivedi Park," Arun's pangs of conscience over his part
in his "slow" daughter Radhika's suicide are manifest in his
certainty she's "haunting" him and in his desperate need to cleanse
his guilt one rainy day. In "Lost in the USA," Pramila, an elderly
widow from Bombay visiting her son in America, tries with
serio-comic results to assert her independence by making an
ill-fated bus trip to a shopping mall.

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IQBAL PITTALWALA was born in Bombay, India, and came to
the United States in 1985 to pursue a Ph.D. in atmospheric science
at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. While writing
his dissertation, he experienced writer's block and signed up for a
writers' workshop, not knowing it was a fiction-writing class. This
serendipitous turn of events helped him discover his passion for
writing fiction. He completed his dissertation, but after graduation
he went straight to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he received
his M.F.A. in creative writing in 1995. His stories have appeared in
many venues including Seattle Review, Blue Mesa Review, and
Confrontation. He lives in Southern California, where he writes
press releases on science and engineering research done at the
University of California, Riverside.