The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature

Jacket Description/Flap: 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. Review Quotes: "A very lucid and engaging selection that, for the first time, sets the quite extraordinary phenomenon of Indian writing . . . in clear context." "--The Spectator"Publisher Marketing: 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. Review Citations:

Booklist 06/01/2002 pg. 1669 (EAN 9780375713002, Paperback)

Library Journal 05/01/2002 pg. 102 (EAN 9780375713002, Paperback)

Publishers Weekly 06/10/2002 (EAN 9780375713002, Paperback)

Kirkus Reviews 05/15/2002 pg. 679 (EAN 9780375713002, Paperback)

PW Notes and Reprints 06/10/2002 pg. 43 (EAN 9780375713002, Paperback)

Contributor Bio:  Chaudhuri, Amit Amit Chaudhuri is the author of several award-winning novels and an internationally acclaimed musician and essayist. Freedom Song: Three Novels received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. His many international honors include the Commonwealth Writers' Prize; most recently, he became the first recipient of the Infosys Prize for Humanities-Literary Studies. He is a contributor to the London Review of Books, Granta, and The Times Literary Supplement.