About the Author

Kirin Narayan is the author of Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels; Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon; the novel Love, Stars, and All That; and the memoir My Family and Other Saints, published by the University of Chicago Press. A former Guggenheim fellow, she is professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Reviews

"Balm for the loneliness and torment of the ethnographic writer, this manual by one of the most distinguished offers the user a personal writer's workshop, at once charming, therapeutic, and practical. The author's mother, her most astute reader, asks: 'A lot of people have no problem writing. The bigger thing I'd like to know is, do you have any thoughts on how to put all the different little bits together?' With the help of Anton Chekhov, her muse and obsession, Narayan does." (George Marcus, University of California, Irvine)"