Sacred Outcast: Dispatches from India

by Harold Jaffe

Thirty-five years ago, American author Harold Jaffe traveled throughout India. The place that made the strongest impression on him was the holy Hindu city of Varanasi (also known as Benares or Kashi). In 2015, he returned to Varanasi for six months and wrote Sacred Outcast: Dispatches from India, which, unexpectedly, melded his current stay with his India travels over three decades ago. The “dispatches" combine close description with narrative, dialogue, fantasy, and an ongoing interrogation of the caste system. In times when official cruelty dominates, Jaffe uncovers the sacred beauty of an oppressed, wounded people, chronicling their maladies and long suffering.

120 pages, Paperback

Published May 1, 2017

About the author

Harold Jaffe is the author of 22 books, including nine fiction collections, one nonfiction collection, and three novels.

Jaffe's fiction has appeared in such journals as The Mississippi Review, City Lights Review, The Paris Review, New Directions in Prose and Poetry, Chicago Review, Chelsea, Fiction, Central Park, Witness, Black Ice, Minnesota Review, Boundary 2, ACM, Black Warrior Review, Cream City Review, Two Girls' Review, and New Novel Review. His stories have been anthologized in Pushcart Prize, Best American Stories, Best of American Humor, Storming the Reality Studio, American Made, Avant Pop: Fiction for a Daydreaming Nation, After Yesterday's Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology, Bateria and Am Lit (Germany), Borderlands (Mexico), Praz (Italy), Positive (Japan), and elsewhere.

His novels and stories have been translated into German, Japanese, Spanish, French, Dutch, Czech, and Serbo-Croatian.

Harold Jaffe has won two NEA grants in fiction, a New York CAPS grant, a California Arts Council fellowship in fiction, and a San Diego fellowship (COMBO) in fiction.

Jaffe teaches literature at San Diego State University and is editor of Fiction International.