Ginu Kamani was born in Bombay, India and moved to the U.S. at age 14. Graduating with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Colorado, Boulder, she returned to Bombay for three years to work in film production, then came back to the U.S. to write full time. Two of her short stories from this collection and several of her poems were published under her full name, Gaurangi Kamani, in the anthology Our Feet Walk the Sky: Women of the South Asian Diaspora (Aunt Lute Books).Kamani, who lives in the Bay Area, is working on film projects while finishing her novel. She is a writer in residence at Mills College.

Junglee Girl
Ginu Kamani

"Junglee" (stemming from the Sanskrit root "jungle") is used in 
India to label the wild, the uncivilized, the untamed. Used most commonly as condemnation or censure, it aims to break the spirit of women yearning for personal power. The female protagonists in these eleven stories recklessly pursue their sensual paths through a complex social world that seeks to shut them out. With wily irreverence and a willful rawness, Kamani pulls back the veil of convention, inch by inch, and draws the reader into the disquieting truth of women's lives, charting territory both intimate and bizarre.

“Ginu Kamani, a gifted, savvy writer, combines such precarious, complex elements as class, caste, gender and eroticism into readable, imaginative and often hilarious tales.”

—Publishers Weekly

“This collection of delightful and sometimes provocative stories surprise and arouse…Ginu Kamani’s stories are tinged with humour and are often disturbing in their exploration of taboo passions and desires. Kamani is an original storyteller who writes from ‘inside’ the culture, claiming a rightful space for Indian women to define themselves.”

—Pratibha Parmar

“Junglee Girl is a delightfully seditious collection of tales, like some profane kama sutra of contemporary India.”

—San Francisco Review of Books

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