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Short-Listed for the 2011 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize NomineeLonglisted for the Frank O'Connor Short Story Award"Clark Blaise’s superbly thought The Meagre Tarmac is just a book in short-story form, warmly personal, surprising in its fast leaps and facts, a portrait of people for whom we arrived at care deeply – and a portrait of an Indo-American life-style that shimmers before our eyes with all the wealthy and persuasive depth for which Clark Blaise’s fiction is famous.… The Meagre Tarmac is just a amazing accomplishment."—Joyce Denise OatesAn Indo-American Canterbury Tales, The Meagre Tarmac examines the locations where Development, convention, culture, and energy talk with intense force. It starts with Vivek Waldekar, who declined to go to his father’s memorial since he was “trying to please an American woman who believed starting a flame in his father’s physique too major a sacrilege to contemplate.” It stops with Pranab Dasgupta, the Rockefeller of India, who can just only explain herself as “‘a very lonesome, very wealthy, very responsible immigrant.’” And in between is just a bunch of amazing figures, incensed by the discord between individual need and obligation, who exhaust themselves in search of the amazing. Ferociously smart and courageous, these tales are classic Blaise, whose outsider’s view of the heart of America happens to be shifting and callous and sensitive.