Amit Chaudhuri

DIV In 1999, Amit Chaudhuri moved back to Calcutta, the city in which he was born. It was a place he had loved in his youth and the place he had made his name writing about. But upon his return he discovered that the Calcutta of his imagination had receded and another had taken its place. Lyrical, observant and profound, Calcutta is a personal account of two years (2009–2011) spent in one of the least known – yet greatest – cities of our time by one of our leading novelists. 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 towards the twenty-first, when – utterly changed – it seems to be on the verge of another turn. Along the way he evokes all that is most particular and extraordinary. From the homeless and the working class to the old, declining haute bourgeois; from the new malls and hotels to old houses being destroyed by developers; from politicians on their way out to the city’s fitful attempts to embrace globalisation, Calcutta brings a multifarious universe to life. /div

Two Years in the City

Calcutta

The new novel about the present, the past, and the slippage between private and public life-from a writer who has 'like Proust, mastered the art of the moment.' (Hilary Mantel) 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.

Sojourn

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 his 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. Amit Chaudhuri's new novel is about geographical, historical and personal change. It asks a question we all grapple with in our lives: what does it mean to exist in both the past and the present? It is a striking reminder that, as the Guardian has said, 'Chaudhuri has been pushing away at form, trying to make something new of the novel.'

Friend of My Youth

Afternoon Raag

An Indian university student in London who wants to be a poet and his celibate, genteel uncle each cope with being alone, feeling isolated and shared family history. By the award-winning author of The Immortals.

Odysseus Abroad

Henry Green

Party Going

The immortals

Three Novels

Freedom Song

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.

Stories and a Reminiscence

Real Time

'Supple, intricate and uncompromising, full of delicate observation and insight, Amit Chaudhuri's Finding the Raga immerses us in the rigorous beauty and cosmology of Indian classical music. It is also a loving memoir about relationships and places, dedication and vocation.' Geoff Dyer 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.

An Improvisation on Indian Music

Finding the Raga

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

Vidyan Ravinthiran

A Strange and Sublime Address

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.

"Writers in Translation, established in 2005 and supported by Bloomberg and Arts Council England, champions the best literature from around the world. To mark the programme's tenth anniversary, ten leading writers from around the world, many of whom have been supported in their work by English PEN, explore the themes of movement, freedom and narrative. Introduced by Amit Chaudhuri, the collection includes contributions from: Asmaa al Ghul Mahmoud Dowlatabadi Ayelet Gundar-Goshen Chan Koonchung Hanna Krall Andrey Kurkov Valeria Luiselli Andres Neuman Alain Mabanckou Samar Yazbek."--Wheelers.co.nz.

journeys through world literature

Life from elsewhere

Stories and Reminiscence

Arising from visits to sweet shops in the by-lanes of Calcutta, these poems brim with the excitement of what it means to discover, marvel at, and taste the universe. As the first line of the book states, 'The whole universe is here'. Showcasing the edible, the intimate, and the singular, this collection, like the sweet-shop shelf, is characterized by 'an unnoticed balance of gravity and play'.

Sweet Shop

Shyamji has music in his blood, for his father was the acclaimed 'heavenly singer' and guru, Ram Lal. But Shyam Lal is not his father, and knows he never will be. Mallika Sengupta's voice could have made her famous, but being the wife of a successful businessman is a full-time occupation in itself. Mallika's son, Nirmalya, believes in suffering for his art, and for him, all compromise is failure: those with talent should be true to that talent. No matter what. Written in haunting, melodic prose, The Immortals tells the story -- or stories -- of Shyam, Mallika and Nirmalya: their relationships, their lives, their music. More than that, though, it is also the story of music itself, of music as art, and an exploration of its place in the modern world of money and commerce. 'Among the literary voices from India to have made themselves heard in this country over the past ten years, Amit Chaudhuri's is one of the most immpressive: beautifully balanced, affecting, truthful' Sunday Telegraph

The Immortals

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.

A New World

Professor in Contemporary Literature Amit Chaudhuri

Published for the first time in the United States, three critically acclaimed short novels--Freedom Song, Afternoon Raag, and A Strange and Sublime Address--offer an intimate portrait of India and its middle-class inhabitants. 15,00 first printing.

Amit Chaudhuri

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