Mad country

Mad Country is a collection of short stories by Samrat Upadhyay, set where Nepali and American lives meet. Its characters move between Kathmandu and the United States, and each story takes a different person into a different pressure point.

In Kathmandu, the government targets journalists. A Nepali man studying in America leaves school and becomes caught up in the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. Elsewhere, a white American woman relocates to Nepal and takes a new name.

Other stories turn to a Nepali man who falls in love with a mysterious foreign black woman, and to a rich young man absorbed in his own fantasies of poverty and bank robbery.

The title story follows the owner of a construction company, a powerful woman, who becomes a political prisoner. The prose is stark and unflinching, and it shows both her surroundings and her mind being radically remade.

The stories vary in form, and they range from heartbreak to hope. Together they look at globalization and exile, and at how far people can be pulled from the lives they had.