Download or read book A Strange and Sublime Address written by Amit Chaudhuri and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2024-05-14 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writer and musician Amit Chaudhuri’s elegant debut novel, in which an Indian ten-year-old experiences the entirely distinct experiences of life in Bombay, where his family lives, and Calcutta, where he visits relatives during his summer vacation. Ten-year-old Sandeep lives in a high-rise in Bombay, where his father has an important job that keeps him busy all the time. Come summer, Sandeep and his mother travel to Calcutta to spend time with his aunt, his self-absorbed and improvident uncle, and Abhi, his favorite cousin. His relatives’ house is shadowy and rambling; the vast city around it ramshackle and alluring. They fascinate curious, observant Sandeep. Days pass; the heat grows; the rains come; the visit ends. In the winter, Sandeep and his family return to Calcutta—and encounter an unexpected turn of events. But Sandeep has arrived at a new sense of things, an understanding of how the marvelous inheres in the mundane, that will be his, we feel, for good. At once delicate and incisive, A Strange and Sublime Address succeeds in both immersing us in a boy’s inner world and depicting that boy and his world from outside. It was Amit Chaudhuri’s first book, the work of a novelist whose striking originality of conception would subsequently become ever more clear. The three decades since the publication of A Strange and Sublime Address have only confirmed its appeal and poetry.
Download or read book A Strange and Sublime Address written by Amit Chaudhuri and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2016-10-25 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book A Strange and Sublime Address written by Amit Chaudhuri and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-04-02 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Strange and Sublime Address, Amit Chaudhuri’s first book, features a Bengali boy who spends his school holidays at his uncle's home in Calcutta. Heatwaves, thunderstorms, mealtimes, prayer-sessions, shopping expeditions and family visits create a shifting background to the shaping of people's lives. Delicate, nuanced, full of exquisite detail, A Strange and Sublime Address is a small masterpiece. The book also includes nine short stories about the city.
Download or read book Afternoon Raag written by Amit Chaudhuri and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2024-05-14 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the UK’s Encore Award for best second novel, a lyrical story of a Bengali student at Oxford University who is caught in the complications of a love triangle. Afternoon Raag is a book of branching and overlapping stories, a book that like memory moves unpredictably in time. In it, a nameless first-person narrator looks back at his student days in Oxford, a period of loneliness and discovery when his affections were torn between two women, and to the summer vacations that took him from England to Bombay, where his parents lived, and later to Calcutta, where he was born. Descriptions of Oxford’s green lawns and drab dorms, of friends and classes and the relentless drizzle, sit beside Bombay street scenes and recollections of the teacher, now dead, from whom the narrator and his mother learned music. Afternoon Raag is a book about the uncertainty of youth and the strange inevitability of growing up. Its images are wonderfully vivid; its rhythms elastic and entrancing. Throughout it is haunted by the spirit of the music teacher, the master singer who gives shape to the elusive and annihilating passage of time.
Download or read book Friend of My Youth written by Amit Chaudhuri and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2019-02-05 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intensely personal novel about childhood, memory, and history by one of today's most celebrated authors, now available in the US for the first time. Friend of My Youth begins with the novelist Amit Chaudhuri returning to Bombay, the city in which he grew up, to give a reading. Ramu, the friend of his youth, with whom he likes to get together when he comes back, is not there: after years of disabling drug addiction, Ramu has signed up for an intensive rehab program. But Amit Chaudhuri has errands to run in Bombay for his mother and wife, which take him back to the Taj Mahal Hotel, the site, not that long before, of a brutal terrorist attack. Amit Chaudhuri writes novels the way an extraordinary instrumentalist makes music, stating and restating his themes, trying them out in different keys and to various effect, developing and dropping them, only to pick them up again and turn them completely around. He engages both our minds and our hearts. He makes us marvel. Friend of My Youth, his deceptively casual and continually observant and inventive new novel, makes us see and feel the great city of Bombay while bringing us into the quizzical, tender, rueful, and reflective sensibility of its central character, Amit Chaudhuri, not to be confused, we are told, with the novelist who wrote this book. Friend of My Youth reflects on the nature of identity, the passage of time, the experience of friendship, the indignities of youth and middle age, the lives of parents and children, and, for all the humor that seasons its pages, terror, the terror that can strike from nowhere, the terror that is a fact of daily life. Friend of My Youth is fearfully and wonderfully made.
Download or read book Sojourn written by Amit Chaudhuri and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2022-09-06 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this haunting and noirish novel by a leading author and critic, an Indian writer travels to Berlin and soon finds himself slipping into a fragmented, fuguelike state. An Indian writer has come to Berlin as a visiting professor. This is his second sojourn in the city, which seems strange, and also strangely familiar, to him. He is disoriented by its names, its immensity, and its history; he is worried that something may happen to him there. Faqrul, a friendly Bangladeshi poet living in exile, takes him up—then disappears. The visiting writer is increasingly adrift in a city that not long ago was two cities, each cut off from the other, much as the new unified city is cut off from the divided one of the past. It is the fall of 2005; every day it grows colder. The visitor is beginning to feel his middle age. To him, the new world of the twenty-first century, with its endless commodities from all over the place and no prospect of any sort of historical transformation, appears to exist in a state of amnesiac suspense. He gets involved with a woman, Birgit. He begins to miss his classes. He blacks out in the street. People are worried. “I’ve lost my bearings—not in the city; in its history,” he thinks. “The less sure I become of it, the more I know my way.” But does he? Amit Chaudhuri’s Sojourn is a dramatic and disconcerting work of fiction, a book about the present as it slips into the past, a picture of a city and of a troubled mind, a historical novel about an ostensibly post-historical time, a story of haunting. Here, as in his earlier work, Chaudhuri pries open fictional form to explore questions of public and private life in ways that are both bold and subtle.
Download or read book Calcutta written by Amit Chaudhuri and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-09-10 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning author Amit Chaudhuri has been widely praised for the beauty and subtle power of his writing and for the ways in which he makes “place” as complex a character as his men and women. Now he brings these gifts to a spellbinding amalgam of memoir, reportage, and history in this intimate, luminous portrait of Calcutta. Chaudhuri guides us through the city where he was born, the home he loved as a child, the setting of his acclaimed novels—a place he now finds captivating for all the ways it has, and, perhaps more powerfully, has not, changed. He shows us a city relatively untouched by the currents of globalization but possessed of a “self-renewing way of seeing, of inhabiting space, of apprehending life.” He takes us along vibrant avenues and derelict alleyways; introduces us to intellectuals, Marxists, members of the declining haute bourgeoisie, street vendors, domestic workers; brings to life the city’s sounds and smells, its architecture, its traditional shops and restaurants, new malls and hotels. And, using the historic elections of 2011 as a fulcrum, Chaudhuri looks back to the nineteenth century, when the city burst with a new vitality, and toward the politics of the present, finding a city “still not recovered from history” yet possessed of a singular modernity. Chaudhuri observes and writes about Calcutta with rare candor and clarity, making graspable the complex, ultimately ineluctable reasons for his passionate attachment to the place and its people.
Download or read book Clearing a Space written by Amit Chaudhuri and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2008 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Freedom Song written by Amit Chaudhuri and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2024-05-14 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, a graceful depiction of middle-class Calcutta, seen through the lives of two interlinked families living in the city during the 1990s. Freedom Song is a novel about family life and city life at an uneasy moment in time. Set in Calcutta in 1993, the book begins by introducing us to Khuku, whose husband Shib is a retired executive and whose son has gone to live in America. Khuku’s old friend Mini, a teacher suffering from a bad case of arthritis, is paying a visit, which gives the two women a chance to gossip and reminisce and see the town. Khuku’s brother, Bhola, lives nearby with his wife and two grown children. Everyone is concerned about his son, Bhaskar, who has recently joined the Communist Party. He sells the party newspaper on the streets. He engages in street theater, and while no longer in his first youth, he remains unmarried. Freedom Song circles around this small upper-middle-class world, with its customs, memories, pleasures, and worries, but also ventures out into the wider world, in which the destruction of the venerable Babri Masjid by Hindu fundamentalists has started a cycle of sectarian violence. A novel of ordinary life, of work and love, shadowed by larger uncertainty, Freedom Song is a transfixing performance, deeply humane and winningly humorous, by one of the subtlest and sharpest writers of our time. A world of insight and feeling emerges from Amit Chaudhuri’s wonderfully expansive sentences, and style is revealed as nothing less than a form of knowledge.
Download or read book 2000ft Above Worry Level written by Eamonn Marra and published by Victoria University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everything is sad and funny and nothing is anything else2000ft Above Worry Level begins on the sad part of the internet and ends at the top of a cliff face. This episodic novel is piloted by a young, anhedonic, gentle, slightly disassociated man. He has no money. He has a supportive but disintegrating family. He is trying hard to be better. He is painting a never-ending fence.Eamonn Marra’s debut novel occupies the precarious spaces in which many twenty-somethings find themselves, forced as they are to live in the present moment as late capitalism presses in from all sides. Mortifying subjects – loserdom, depression, unemployment, cam sex – are surveyed with dignity and stoicism. Beneath Marra’s precise, unemotive language and his character’s steadfast grip on the surface of things, something is stirring.
Download or read book The Dirty Dust written by Máirtín Ó Cadhain and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-01 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s irresistible and infamous novel The Dirty Dust is consistently ranked as the most important prose work in modern Irish, yet no translation for English-language readers has ever before been published. Alan Titley’s vigorous new translation, full of the brio and guts of Ó Cadhain’s original, at last brings the pleasures of this great satiric novel to the far wider audience it deserves. In The Dirty Dust all characters lie dead in their graves. This, however, does not impair their banter or their appetite for news of aboveground happenings from the recently arrived. Told entirely in dialogue, Ó Cadhain’s daring novel listens in on the gossip, rumors, backbiting, complaining, and obsessing of the local community. In the afterlife, it seems, the same old life goes on beneath the sod. Only nothing can be done about it—apart from talk. In this merciless yet comical portrayal of a closely bound community, Ó Cadhain remains keenly attuned to the absurdity of human behavior, the lilt of Irish gab, and the nasty, deceptive magic of human connection.
Download or read book Finding the Raga written by Amit Chaudhuri and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Biography An autobiographical exploration of the role and meaning of music in our world by one of India's greatest living authors, himself a vocalist and performer. Amit Chaudhuri, novelist, critic, and essayist, is also a musician, trained in the Indian classical vocal tradition but equally fluent as a guitarist and singer in the American folk music style, who has recorded his experimental compositions extensively and performed around the world. A turning point in his life took place when, as a lonely teenager living in a high-rise in Bombay, far from his family’s native Calcutta, he began, contrary to all his prior inclinations, to study Indian classical music. Finding the Raga chronicles that transformation and how it has continued to affect and transform not only how Chaudhuri listens to and makes music but how he listens to and thinks about the world at large. Offering a highly personal introduction to Indian music, the book is also a meditation on the differences between Indian and Western music and art-making as well as the ways they converge in a modernism that Chaudhuri reframes not as a twentieth-century Western art movement but as a fundamental mode of aesthetic response, at once immemorial and extraterritorial. Finding the Raga combines memoir, practical and cultural criticism, and philosophical reflection with the same individuality and flair that Chaudhuri demonstrates throughout a uniquely wide-ranging, challenging, and enthralling body of work.
Download or read book Hope Island written by Tim Major and published by Titan Books (US, CA). This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gripping supernatural mystery for fans of John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos from the author of Snakeskins. Workaholic TV news producer Nina Scaife is determined to fight for her daughter, Laurie, after her partner Rob walks out on her. She takes Laurie to visit Rob's parents on the beautiful but remote Hope Island, to prove to her that they are still a family. But Rob's parents are wary of Nina, and the islanders are acting strangely. And as Nina struggles to reconnect with Laurie, the silent island children begin to lure her daughter away. Meanwhile, Nina tries to resist the scoop as she is drawn to a local artists' commune, the recently unearthed archaeological site on their land, and the dead body on the beach...
Download or read book Into the Sublime written by Kate A. Boorman and published by Henry Holt and Company (BYR). This book was released on 2022-07-26 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Gripping and breathless, Into the Sublime is equal parts terrifying, claustrophobic, psychological, and cunning." —Wendy Heard, author of She's Too Pretty to Burn and Dead End Girls A new YA psychological thriller from Kate A. Boorman, author of What We Buried, about four teenage girls who descend into a dangerous underground cave system in search of a lake of local legend, said to reveal your deepest fears. When the cops arrive, only a few things are clear: - Four girls entered a dangerous cave. - Three of them came out alive. - Two of them were rushed to the hospital. - And one is soaked in blood and ready to talk. Amelie Desmarais' story begins believably enough: Four girls from a now-defunct thrill-seeking group planned an epic adventure to find a lake that Colorado locals call "The Sublime." Legend has it that the lake has the power to change things for those who risk—and survive—its cavernous depths. They each had their reasons for going. For Amelie, it was a promise kept to her beloved cousin, who recently suffered a tragic accident during one of the group’s dares. But as her account unwinds, and the girls’ personalities and motives are drawn, things get complicated. Amelie is hardly the thrill-seeking type, and it appears she’s not the only one with the ability to deceive. Worse yet, Amelie is covered in someone's blood, but whose exactly? And where's the fourth girl? Is Amelie spinning a tale to cover her guilt? Or was something inexplicable waiting for the girls down there? Amelie's the only one with answers, and she's insisting on an explanation that is more horror-fantasy than reality. Maybe the truth lies somewhere in between? After all, strange things inhabit dark places. And sometimes we bring the dark with us.
Download or read book Sublime Spaces and Visionary Worlds written by Leslie Umberger and published by Princeton Architectural Press. This book was released on 2007-10-04 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The need to personalize our surroundings is a defining human characteristic. For some this need becomes a compulsion to transform their personal surroundings into works of art. The John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, has undertaken the mission to preserve these environments, which are presented for the first time in Sublime Spaces and Visionary Worlds. This colorful and inspiring book features the work of twenty-two vernacular artists whose locales, personal histories, and reasons for art-making vary widely but who all share a powerful connection to the home as art. Featured projects range from art environments that remain intact, such as Simon Rodia's Watts Towers in California, tosites lost over the years such as Emery Blagdon's six hundred elaborate "Healing Machines," made of copper, aluminum, tinfoil, magnets, ribbons, farm-machinery parts, painted light bulbs, beads, coffee-can lids, and more. Sublime Spaces and Visionary Worlds is the first book to explore these spectacularly offbeat spaces in detail.From "Original Rhinestone Cowboy" Loy Bowlin's wall-to-wall glitter-and-foil living room to the concrete bestiary of "witch of Fox Point" Mary Nohl, each artist and project is described in detail through a wealth of visuals and text. Sublime Spaces and Visionary Worlds reminds us that our decorative choices tell the world not just what we like but who we are.
Download or read book What Makes a Wine Worth Drinking written by Terry Theise and published by Harvest. This book was released on 2018 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A paean to authentic wines, describing their fundamental qualities and their power to improve and enrich our lives, from "one of the wine world's most intriguing personalities" (New York Times).
Download or read book Mrs Dalloway written by Virginia Woolf and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2023-12-16 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf's fourth novel, offers the reader an impression of a single June day in London in 1923. Clarissa Dalloway, the wife of a Conservative member of parliament, is preparing to give an evening party, while the shell-shocked Septimus Warren Smith hears the birds in Regent's Park chattering in Greek. There seems to be nothing, except perhaps London, to link Clarissa and Septimus. She is middle-aged and prosperous, with a sheltered happy life behind her; Smith is young, poor, and driven to hatred of himself and the whole human race. Yet both share a terror of existence, and sense the pull of death. The world of Mrs Dalloway is evoked in Woolf's famous stream of consciousness style, in a lyrical and haunting language which has made this, from its publication in 1925, one of her most popular novels.
