Outside People and Other Stories

By Mariam Pirbhai

A Haitian woman survives the ravages of an earthquake only to find her sister, an émigré in Montreal, the subject of a grisly crime. A chambermaid in a Mexican tourist resort frequented by Canadian tourists wonders why all the men in her life seem to leave her for distant lands. A Jamaican migrant worker at an Ontario chicken farm comes to the aid of his Peruvian co-worker on the eve of a fatal car accident. And a young Pakistani-Canadian woman finds herself in the midst of a protest march defending Muslim women’s rights on the same day she has agreed to meet her Moroccan lover. The diverse cast of characters that energize Mariam Pirbhai’s Outside People and Other Stories not only reflects a multicultural Canada but also the ease with which this striking debut collection inhabits the voices and perspectives of nation, hemisphere, and world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Inanna Poetry and Fiction Series
• Release date: Sep 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781771334365

Mariam Pirbhai

Mariam Pirbhai was born in Karachi, Pakistan before her family took to the skies, alighting on England and the Philippines before arriving in Canada’s terra firma. Here, she has charted her own journey across three provinces, eventually settling in Waterloo, Ontario, where she works as an associate professor in the Department of English and Film Studies, at Wilfrid Laurier University. She is the author of Mythologies of Migration, Vocabularies of Indenture: Novels of the South Asian Diaspora in Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia-Pacific and co-editor of Critical Perspectives on Indo-Caribbean Women’s Literature. Her short fiction has appeared in several anthologies including When Your Voice Tastes Like Home: Immigrant Women Write and Her Mother’s Ashes, Volume 3: Stories by South Asian Women in Canada and the United States, as well as in national and international journals such as South Asian Review, jaggerylit: A DesiLit Arts and Literature Journal, Maple Tree Literary Supplement, and Dalhousie Review. Outside People and Other Stories is her debut collection of short fiction. She lives in Waterloo.

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