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In Friend of My Youth, a novelist named Amit Chaudhuri visits his childhood home of Bombay. The city, reeling from the impact of the 2008 terrorist attacks, weighs heavily on Amit's mind, as does the unexpected absence of his childhood friend Ramu, a drifting, opaque figure who is Amit's last remaining connection to the city he once called home.
In 1999, Amit Chaudhuri returned with his family to Calcutta. He did so tentatively. Calcutta was where his parents had moved after retirement; it was the city he had loved in his youth and in whose lanes he had spent tranquil childhood holidays; one he had made his name writing about. But that Calcutta had receded and another had taken its place. Calcutta is Chaudhuri’s account of two years (2009–11) in the great metropolis. Using the idea of return and the historical elections of 2011 as his fulcrum, he travels between the nineteenth century, when the city burst with a new vitality, to the twenty-first century, when, utterly changed, it seems to be on the verge of another turn. Along t...
Ten-year-old Sandeep, an only child in a Bombay high-rise, visits his extended family in Calcutta during the school holidays—leaving the smooth silence of his parents’ modern flat for a world of enchantment in his uncle’s home. Everything is different here. In a short novel filled with indelible characters, we witness the beautiful ordinariness of daily life in a middle-class family dependent on a failing business. Whether they are push-starting a stubborn Ambassador, combating heatwaves and thunderstorms or saying their prayers, the young narrator’s keen eye misses nothing. Widely hailed as a poet of the mundane, the renowned Amit Chaudhuri gives us contemporary India as you never see it. In this 25th anniversary edition of his exquisite debut, comprising a novel and nine stories, revisit this acute portrait of Calcutta from one of our finest novelists: a small masterpiece.
A beguiling, short and yet sweeping prose-poem, Afternoon Raag is the account of a young Bengali man studying at Oxford University and caught in complicated love triangle. His loneliness and melancholy sharpen his memories of home, which come back to haunt him in vivid, sensory detail. Intensely moving, superbly written, Afternoon Raag is a testimony to the clash of the old and the new; arrivals and departures. With an introduction by James Wood
Set across Bombay and Calcutta, Amit Chaudhuri's stories range from a divorcee about to enter into an arranged marriage to a teengaed poet who develops a relationship with a lonely widower, from a singing teacher struggling to make a living out of the boredom of his students to gauche teenager desperate to hurdle past his adolescence. Rich with subtlety, elegance and deep feeling, Real Time is classic Chaudhuri.
Recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, feted by politicians, the Church and the world's media, Mother Teresa of Calcutta appears to be on the fast track to sainthood. But what makes Mother Teresa so divine? In this frank and damning exposé of the Teresa cult, Hitchens details the nature and limits of one woman's mission to help the world's poor. He probes the source of the heroic status bestowed upon an Albanian nun whose only declared wish was to serve God. He asks whether Mother Teresa's good works answered any higher purpose than the need of the world's privileged to see someone, somewhere, doing something for the Third World. He unmasks pseudo-miracles, questions Mother Teresa's fitness to...
Spanning a writing career of over twenty years, the acclaimed novelist Amit Chaudhuri is also one of the most gifted essayists and critics writing today, whose work has appeared in the pages of many of the most prestigious newspapers and journals in the world, including the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, Granta, the Guardian, and the Dublin Review. Collected here for the first time, Telling Tales is a selection of Chaudhuri’s most enduring short non-fiction that showcases his sense of humour, his idiosyncratic capacity to transform the mundane, his political engagement, and his mastery of words. From playing ‘Cowboys and Indians’ as a child in India to an outsider’s perspective on the British class system to a plane that was hijacked by Pakistani men and taken to Afghanistan at the turn of the millennium to the works of V.S. Naipaul and to the humble Indian savoury the chanachur, these essays display Chaudhuri’s ability to find meaning in every aspect of the physical and intellectual world and will consolidate his reputation as one of the most original and elegant writers publishing in English today.
This Is Probably The First Instance Of Lawrence`S Poetry Being Discussed In The Light Of Recent Theoretical Developments. It Is Also Certainly The First Time A Leading Postcolonial Writer Of His Generation Has Taken As His Subject A Major Canonical English Writer, And Through Him, Remapped The English Canon As A Site Of `Difference`.
Offers an exploration of what it means to be a modern Indian in relation to the West. This work features essays about Indian popular culture and high culture, travel and location in Paris, Bombay, Dublin, Calcutta and Berlin, empire and nationalism, Indian and Western cinema, music, art and literature, politics, race, and cosmopolitanism.
Such a Long Journey is set in (what was then) Bombay against the backdrop of war in the Indian subcontinent and the birth of Bangladesh, telling the story of the peculiar way in which the conflict impinges on the lives of Gustad Noble, an ordinary man, and his family. It was the brilliant first novel by one of the most remarkable writers to have emerged from the Indian literary tradition in many years. It was shortlisted for the 1991 Booker Prize, and won the 1992 Commonwealth Writers Prize.