A collection of stories drawn from the ample body of work Ruth published only in the New Yorker, alongside a few other stories long out of print and out of the public eye provides a perfect introduction for new readers of Ruth’s work, as well as an exciting new treasure for existing fans

Ruth began publishing in the New Yorker in 1957 and this collection spans from the 50s to the 80s. The introduction is from Ruth herself; an adaptation of the beautiful lecture she gave when awarded the Neil Gunn Prize in Scotland in 1979, a piece titled “Disinheritance” that examines the effects and influences that Germany, the UK, India, and New York had on her journey as a writer.

Ruth’s literary history is just as impressive. Her seminal 1975 novel Heat and Dust won the Booker Prize, and the Merchant/Ivory film adaptation won Ruth a BAFTA award. She is the only writer to have won both a Booker and an Oscar. Ruth would go on to write a dozen novels and eight collections of short stories; many reside on the Counterpoint backlist including Lovesong for India, In Search of Love and Beauty, My Nine Lives, Out of India, and our most recent At the End of the Century (2018), a collection of her stories with an introduction by Anita Desai.

Salman Rushdie has described her as a “rootless intellectual” and John Updike described her as an “initiated outsider.” Both comments speak to Ruth’s complicated, international background.

She was born in Cologne, Germany, to Jewish parents, and after experiencing the violence of the Kristallnacht, her family was one of the last groups of refugees to flee the Nazi regime to England. Ruth lived in London during WWII and became a British citizen in 1948. Her life was again changed in 1951 when she met and fell in love with Cyrus Jhabvala, an Indian Parsi architect. They relocated to India and raised three daughters, Ava, Firoza, and Renana. Ruth began a deep and at times conflicted relationship with India, which so often became the focus of her fiction.