Abhi, a Bengali boy, spends his school holidays at his uncle's home in Calcutta, trying to make sense of the often confusing world of adults around him. Heatwaves, thunderstorms, mealtimes, prayer-sessions, shopping expeditions and family visits create the shifting tectonic plates that will eventually shape the family's life. Delicate, nuanced, full of exquisite detail, A Strange and Sublime Address is also a paean to the city, with nine short stories that illustrate the world of Amit Chaudhuri's imagination. With a foreword by Colm Toibin

A year after his divorce, Jayojit Chatterjee, an economics professor in the American Midwest, travels home to Calcutta with his young son, Bonny, to spend the summer holidays with his parents. Jayojit is no more accustomed to spending time alone with Bonny - who lives with his mother in California - than he is with the Admiral and his wife, whose daily rhythms have become so synchronized as to become completely foreign to their son. Together, the unlikely foursome struggles to pass the protracted hours of summer, each in his or her own way mourning Jayojit's failed marriage. Written with depth and tenderness, A New World goes right to the heart of a family, making vividly alive their hopes, desires and regrets.

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.

Khuku, a housewife, is irritated with the Muslims because their call to prayer wakes her up early every morning; her husband, a retired businessman, has been hired to cure a 'sick' sweet factory that doesn't particularly want to be cured. Across town, Khuku's brother worries about his son's affiliations with the Communist Party, but only because they may affect his ever-so-gradually coalescing marriage prospects. Freedom Song is a work of fiction that plays with big ideas while evoking the smallest aspects of everyday life with acute tenderness and extraordinary beauty.

This important study from the prizewinning novelist and critic Amit Chaudhuri explores D. H. Lawrence's position as a 'foreigner' in the English canon. Focusing on the poetry, Chaudhuri examines how Lawrence's works, and Lawrence himself, have been read, and misread, in terms of their 'difference'. This is the first time that Lawrence's poetry has been discussed in the light of post-colonial and post-structuralist theory; it is also the first time a leading post-colonial 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'.

**WINNER OF THE JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE** 'A splendid book.' Literary Review 'A modern masterpiece.' New York Journal of Books Finding the Raga is Amit Chaudhuri's revelatory exploration of North Indian classical music: an ancient, evolving tradition whose principles and practises will alter the reader's notion of what music might - and can - be. Through essay, memoir and cultural study, Chaudhuri dwells on the music's most distinctive and mysterious characteristics, resulting in a gift of a book for musicians and music lovers, and for any creative mind in search of diverse and transforming inspiration. 'Supple, intricate and uncompromising, full of delicate observation and insight.' Geoff Dyer '[A] compelling meditation on Indian and Western art-making.' The New Yorker

**Includes a new foreword by Pankaj Mishra** Bombay in the 1980s: Shyam Lal is a highly regarded voice teacher, trained in the classical idiom but happily teaching more popular songs to well-to-do women, whose modern way of life he covets. Sixteen-year-old Nirmalya Sengupta is the rebellious scion of an affluent family who wants only to study Indian classical music. With a little push from her mother, Shyam agrees to accept Nirmalya as his student, entering into a relationship that will have unexpected and lasting consequences. With quiet humor and unsentimental poignancy, The Immortals is a luminous portrait of the spiritual and emotional force of a revered Indian tradition, of two fundamentally different but intricately intertwined families, and of a society choosing between the old and the new.

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.

Winner of the Encore Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction 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

'Delightfully witty . . . Luminously intelligent . . . Odysseus Abroad has placed itself, with erudition and playfulness, on the map of modernism.' Guardian 1985: twenty-two year old Ananda is a student adrift in Thatcher's Britain, homesick and isolated. His eccentric uncle, Radhesh, is a magnificent failure and an eccentric virgin who has lived in genteel impoverishment in Hampstead for nearly three decades. Over the course of one day, Odysseus Abroad follows the two isolated men on one of their weekly forays, gradually revealing the background to the two men's lives with deft precision and humour as they traverse London together, circling around their respective pasts and futures, and finding in one another an unspoken solace.

By turns essay, memoir and cultural study, Finding the Raga is Amit Chaudhuri's singular account of his discovery of, and enduring passion for, North Indian music: an ancient, evolving tradition whose principles and practices will alter the reader's notion of what music might - and can - be.

Tracing the music's development, Finding the Raga dwells on its most distinctive and mysterious characteristics: its extraordinary approach to time, language and silence; its embrace of confoundment, and its ethos of evocation over representation. The result is a strange gift of a book, for musicians and music lovers, and for any creative mind in search of diverse and transforming inspiration.

'A mysterious, subtle, haunting novel.' Chris Power An unnamed man arrives in Berlin as a visiting professor. It is a place fused with Western history and cultural fracture lines. He moves along its streets and pavements; through its department stores, museums and restaurants. He befriends Faqrul, an enigmatic exiled poet, and Birgit, a woman with whom he shares the vagaries of attraction. He tries to understand his white-haired cleaner. Berlin is a riddle-he becomes lost not only in the city but in its legacy. Sealed off in his own solitude, and as his visiting professorship passes, the narrator awaits transformation and meaning. Ultimately, he starts to understand that the less sure he becomes of his place in the moment, the more he knows his way. 'Chaudhuri has already proved that he can write better than just about anybody of his generation.' Jonathan Coe

Walter Benjamin - philosopher, essayist, literary and cultural theorist - was one of the most original writers and thinkers of the twentieth century. This new selection brings together Benjamin's major works, including 'One-Way Street', his dreamlike, aphoristic observations of urban life in Weimar Germany; 'Unpacking My Library', a delightful meditation on book-collecting; the confessional 'Hashish in Marseille'; and 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', his seminal essay on how technology changes the way we appreciate art. Also including writings on subjects ranging from Proust to Kafka, violence to surrealism, this is the essential volume on one of the most prescient critical voices of the modern age. Contains: 'Unpacking My Library'; 'One-Way Street'; 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'; 'Brief History of Photography'; 'Hashish in Marseille'; 'On the Critique of Violence'; 'The Job of the Translator'; 'Surrealism'; 'Franz Kafka' and 'Picturing Proust'.

Widely regarded as D. H. Lawrence's greatest novel, Women in Love is both a lucid account of English society before the First World War, and a brilliant evocation of the inexorable power of human desire. Women in Love continues where The Rainbow left off, with the third generation of Brangwens: Ursula Brangwen, now a teacher at Beldover, a mining town in the Midlands, and her sister Gudrun, who has returned from art school in London. The focus of the novel is primarily on their relationships, Ursula's with Rupert Birkin, a school inspector, and Gudrun's with industrialist Gerald Crich, and later with a sculptor, Loerke. Quintessentially modernist, Women is Love is one of Lawrence's most extraordinary, innovative and unsettling works. In his introduction Amit Chaudhuri discusses Lawrence's style and imagery. This introduction also includes a chronology of Lawrence's life and work, further reading, notes and appendices containing the original foreword to Women in Love, a fragment of 'The Sisters', 'Prologue' and 'Wedding' chapters from an earlier draft, a map and discussion of the setting and people involved. With an introduction by Amit Chaudhuri. 'His genius was for instant perception and vivid, passionate expression' The Times 'His masterpiece ... Lawrence compels us to admit that we live less finely than we should' New York Review of Books

'Strategic thinking for a writer articulates itself as dislike and as allegiance.' In this wonderfully rich and diverse collection of essays, Amit Chaudhuri explores the way in which writers understand and promote their own work in antithesis to writers and movements that have gone before. Chaudhuri's criticism disproves and questions several assumptions-that a serious and original artist cannot think critically in a way that matters; that criticism can't be imaginative, and creative work contain radical argumentation; that a writer reflecting on their own position and practice cannot be more than a testimony of their work, but open up how we think of literary history and reading. Illuminating new ways of thinking about Western and non-Western traditions, prejudices, and preconceptions, Chaudhuri shows us again that he takes nothing as a given: literary tradition, the prevalent definitions of writing and culture; and the way the market determines the way culture and language express themselves. He asks us to look again at what we mean by the modern, and how it might be possible to think of the literary today.

In 1980s Bombay, a highly regarded voice teacher and his affluent sixteen-year-old student enter into a relationship that will have unexpected and lasting consequences in their lives, and the lives of their families. With exquisitely sensuous detail, quiet humor, and unsentimental poignancy, Amit Chaudhuri paints a luminous portrait of the spiritual and emotional force behind a revered Indian tradition; of two fundamentally different but intricately intertwined families; and of a society choosing between the old and the new.

Celebrating the first ten years of the Writers in Translation Programme Writers in Translation, established in 2005 and supported by Bloomberg and Arts Council England, champions the best literature from across the globe. To mark the programme's tenth anniversary, English PEN and Pushkin Press present Life from Elsewhere: Journeys Through World Literature - ten new essays by leading international writers, with an introduction by award-winning novelist and critic Amit Chaudhuri. These illuminating, invigorating pieces reflect on the question of identity, both personal and political, in a many-frontiered world. Alain Mabanckou writes on how the Congo remains his umbilical cord, Andres Neuman on growing up in Argentina, Chan Koonchung on the impossibility of defining China, Israel's Ayelet Gundar-Goshen on a meta-fictional encounter between writer and translator, Samar Yazbek on post-revolutionary Syria, Asmaa al-Ghul on how every experience in Palestine is linked to occupation, Mahmoud Dowlatabadi on the defiance of literature in the face of Iran's revolution, Hanna Krall on the lasting effects of the Holocaust in Poland, Andrey Kurkov on the dead and living languages of the Caucasus, and Turkey's Elif Shafak on the necessity of a cosmopolitan and diverse Europe.