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. 

Product Description: In the essays assembled in Clearing a Space, Chaudhuri draws on his own experiences to offer an acute exploration of what it means to be a modern Indian in relation to history. Often beginning with the personal, he inquires into the nature of the secular in India, into the history of such categories as the West, the foreign, the global and the exotic, and into the frequently torn and self-divided nature of modern Indian identity...read more

Product Description: Abandoned by his fellow travelers on a tiger-ridden shore in eastern Bengal, the narrator stumbles across a strange, beautiful woman, Kapalkundala. But she has been enslaved by a priest who plans to sacrifice them both in an esoteric rite...read more

Published in paperback for the first time in the United States, three critically acclaimed short novelsFreedom Song, Afternoon Rag, and A Strange and Sublime Addressoffer an intimate portrait of India and its middleclass inhabitants. Reprint. 17,500 first printing.

Product Description: A sequence of stunningly simple but haunting poems, Jejuri is one of the great books of modern India. Jejuri is a site of pilgramage in author Arun Kolatkar's native state of Maharashtra, and Jejuri the poem is the record of a visit to the town -- a place that is as crassly commercial as it is holy, as modern and ruinous as it is ancient and enduring...read more

Following the failure of his marriage, Jayojit Chatterjee leaves the Midwest with his young son to return home to his parents in Calcutta, where he shares their small, dark apartment while recalling his married life in America, and tries to write. Reprint. 12,500 first printing.

Product Description: In Odysseus Abroad, Amit Chaudhuri charts a day in the life of two Indian men—a twenty-two-year-old student trying (and failing) at being a poet and his bachelor uncle, who has been living in genteel poverty for nearly three decades—as they explore London, the city they now call home...read more

Product Description: Freedman has visited more than thirty of the most significant and beautiful Coffee Houses throughout India. Away from the stereotypes of poverty and exotica they have allowed him to enter an ‘ordinary’ India. Buried deep within the country’s collective memory they have for decades acted simultaneously as political and artistic salons as well as simple eating places...read more

Product Description: This comprehensive anthology of modern Indian writing, covering about 150 years, shatters many illusions about the literature of the continent. Rather than being based on the handful of writers who produce work in English, it focuses on the diverse writings that stem from India's multiple, sometimes competing, traditions...read more

A collection of stories, centered around the cultural turmoil of modern-day India, follows the lives of men, women, children, and gods, from a businessman attending memorial rites for a young suicide to two divorcTes about to enter an arranged marriage, as they attempt to retain a semblance of dignity and discover the true paths of their lives. Reprint.

On communalism and its fallout on Indian political scenario after 1993; also discusses its religious overtones.

A richly diverse anthology capturing a broad array of Indian writing from the 1850s to the present day offers selected works by thirty-eight authors, including contributions by Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Rabindranath Tagore, R. K. Narayan, Bibhuit Bhushan Banerjee, Pankaj Mishra, and others. Original. 17,500 first printing.

Product Description: Women in Love is a novel by British author D. H. Lawrence published in 1920. It is a sequel to his earlier novel The Rainbow (1915), and follows the continuing loves and lives of the Brangwen sisters, Gudrun and Ursula. Gudrun Brangwen, an artist, pursues a destructive relationship with Gerald Crich, an industrialist...read more