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A Strange and Sublime Address
Amit Chaudhuri; Introduction by Colm Tóibín
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R443
R378
Discovery Miles 3 780
Save R65 (15%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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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.
**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
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
**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.
'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.
'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
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.
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.
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.
In recent years American readers have been thrilling to the work of
such Indian writers as Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth. Now this
extravagant and wonderfully discerning anthology unfurls the full
diversity of Indian literature from the 1850s to the present,
presenting today's brightest talents in the company of their
distinguished forbearers and likely heirs.
The thirty-eight authors collected by novelist Amit Chaudhuri write
not only in English but also in Hindi, Bengali, and Urdu. They
include Rabindranath Tagore, arguably the first international
literary celebrity, chronicling the wistful relationship between a
village postal inspector and a servant girl, and Bibhuti Bhushan
Banerjee, represented by an excerpt from his classic novel about an
impoverished Bengali childhood, Pather Panchali." "Here, too, are
selections from Nirad C. Chaudhuri's Autobiography of an Unknown
Indian, R. K. Narayan's The English Teacher," "and Salman Rushdie's
Midnight's Children alongside a high-spirited nonsense tale, a
drily funny account of a pre-Partition Muslim girlhood, and a
Bombay "policier" as gripping as anything by Ed McBain. Never
before has so much of the subcontinent's writing been made
available in a single volume.
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The Essential Tagore (Paperback)
Rabindranath Tagore; Edited by Fakrul Alam, Radha Chakravarty; Foreword by Amit Chaudhuri
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R733
Discovery Miles 7 330
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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"The Essential Tagore "showcases the genius of India s
Rabindranath Tagore, the first Asian Nobel Laureate and possibly
the most prolific and diverse serious writer the world has ever
known.
Marking the 150th anniversary of Tagore s birth, this ambitious
collection the largest single volume of his work available in
English attempts to represent his extraordinary achievements in ten
genres: poetry, songs, autobiographical works, letters, travel
writings, prose, novels, short stories, humorous pieces, and plays.
In addition to the newest translations in the modern idiom, it
includes a sampling of works originally composed in English, his
translations of his own works, three poems omitted from the
published version of the English "Gitanjali," and examples of his
artwork.
Tagore s writings are notable for their variety and innovation.
His "Sonar Tari" signaled a distinctive turn toward the symbolic in
Bengali poetry. The Lord of Life, from his collection "Chitra,"
created controversy around his very personal concept of religion.
"Chokher Bali" marked a decisive moment in the history of the
Bengali novel because of the way it delved into the minds of men
and women. The skits in "Vyangakautuk" mocked upper-class
pretensions. Prose pieces such as The Problem and the Cure were
lauded by nationalists, who also sang Tagore s patriotic songs.
Translations for this volume were contributed by Tagore
specialists and writers of international stature, including Amitav
Ghosh, Amit Chaudhuri, and Sunetra Gupta.
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Women in Love (Paperback, New ed)
D. H Lawrence; Edited by David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey; Introduction by Amit Chaudhuri
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R314
R260
Discovery Miles 2 600
Save R54 (17%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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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
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
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'.
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.
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Freedom Song
Amit Chaudhuri; Introduction by Wendy Doniger
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R465
R396
Discovery Miles 3 960
Save R69 (15%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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'Where most of us can barely trace our own footprints in the mass
of moments that are the stuff of experience, numerous and storyless
as grains of sand on a beach, Chaudhuri delves in masterfully to
lift out arcs, moods, treasures.' James Meek '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
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'.
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