Ten Writers Who Are Reinventing the Art of Storytelling

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In straightforward prose with just a hint of “magical realism,” The Flower in the Skull tells the story of Concha, a Mexican Indian woman driven out of her homeland by the Mexican army. Concha's tribe, the Opata, were an agrarian people, enemies of the Apache and traditional allies of the Mexican government. But in modernizing 19th-century Mexico, as elsewhere, Indians, whether “good” or “bad,” were ultimately simply in the way.

Concha makes it to Tucson, where she works as a domestic, gives birth out of wedlock, lands a husband, moves to Nogales—struggling all the while for a little peace and luck in love. In heartfelt episodes based on the lives of her grandmother and great-grandmother, Alcalá paints a moving portrait of people fighting to be happy despite having been robbed of the Opata world where their happiness was possible.

Alcalá also tells the story of Shelly, a modern-day Chicana with a job in publishing who goes to Tucson to learn more about the apparently vanished Opata. Instead, she discovers the rich, secret Indian dimension of the Chicano experience. “The Opata were the 'well-behaved' Indians,” says Alcalá. “They did the common labor in Tucson. Eventually they were absorbed into the identity called Mexican American.” But indigenous people are part of Chicano communities across the country, she notes. “Native people were driven off their land, but they didn't 'vanish.' They're everywhere.”

SANJAY NIGAM
A man-bites-snake story

It was the rigors of medical training that made the India-born and Arizona-raised Sanjay Nigam, 39, a lover of literature. “I was in the middle of my residency,” he recalls, “and my sleep schedule was totally upset. So I started reading the big books—Proust, Tolstoy, Pasternak.” A medical-research stint in New York gave Nigam a chance to connect with that city's literary life via readings and friendships—“my unofficial M.F.A. program,” he calls it. The first story he sent off was accepted by the prestigious journal Grand Street. That tale, “Charming,” would eventually evolve into his deft first novel, The Snake Charmer (Morrow).

The Snake Charmer is the story of a middle-aged ne'er-do-well named Sonalal who plays the flute for tourists in Old Delhi while his beloved snake, Raju, dances. Sonalal is a drinker and a womanizer whose sharp-tongued wife is fed up with his inability to earn enough—or bring enough home, anyway—to support the family.

One day, Sonalal's life changes forever. He plays so well, and so long, that he's showered with money; yet in the process he exhausts poor Raju, who bites him. Sonalal isn't hurt—Raju's fangs and venom have long since been extracted—but he's enraged, and he bites Raju in two. The man-bites-snake story makes all the papers, and Sonalal is a celebrity. But he's also suddenly afflicted with impotence, remorse about Raju, and, worst of all, inability to make music. What to do? Sonalal's dilemma leads him to, among other places, a fly-by-night sex therapist named Dr. Seth, who asks him about his bowel movements, mumbles some Freudian gibberish, and declares him a homosexual.

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