Korb has a master's degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers. In the following essay, she discusses the themes of identity, ethnicity, and foreignness in "The Middleman".

Bharati Mukherjee's collection of short stories The Middleman and Other Stories centers on the immigrant experience of new Americans coming from around the world—Asia, Africa, the West Indies. These immigrants, according to Fakrul Alam writing in his study Bharati Mukherjee, "are seen to be emerging from shadowy or marginal lives and putting out feelers to root themselves in a brave new world." In two essays that she wrote in the late 1980s, Mukherjee expressed the shift in her literary themes from the exploration of expatriates trying to preserve their identities to "the making of new Americans." Mukherjee writes of both of these experiences from a personal perspective. Born in...