Jeet Thayil

The Book of Chocolate Saints follows the unforgettable character Xavier and his journey towards salvation - or damnation - or perhaps both. In the swooningly hypnotic prose for which his Man Booker Prize-shortlisted novel was acclaimed, Jeet Thayil paints a hallucinatory portrait of an ambiguous soul: a self-destructive figure, a charismatic contrarian, and a tortured damned artist battling with his conflicting instincts. Vividly set in both Delhi and Manhattan, The Book of Chocolate Saints explores our deepest urges in a novel that is sexy, dangerous, and entirely uncompromising. This is intoxicating, blazingly intelligent literary fiction that will consolidate Jeet Thayil's reputation as one of the most promising writers of his generation.

The Book of Chocolate Saints

Ullis went to the bathroom and carefully unfolded the business card and placed it on the sink. Then he rolled up a note and snorted the last of his wife's ashes. Following the death of his wife, Dominic Ullis escapes to Bombay in search of oblivion and a dangerous new drug, Meow Meow. So begins a glorious weekend of misadventure as he tours the teeming, kaleidoscopic city from its sleek eyries of high-capital to the piss-stained streets, encountering a cast with their own stories to tell, but none of whom Ullis - his faculties ever distorted - is quite sure he can trust. Heady, heartbroken and heartfelt, Low is a blazing joyride through the darklands of grief towards obliteration - and, perhaps, epiphany. 'Jeet Thayil delights not just in pushing the bounds of possibility, but in smashing them to smithereens.' John Burnside

Wait now, light me up so we do this right, yes, hold me steady to the lamp, hold it, hold, good, a slow pull to start with, to draw the smoke low into the lungs, yes, oh my... Shuklaji Street, in Old Bombay. In Rashid's opium room the air is thick with voices and ghosts: Hindu, Muslim, Christian. A young woman holds a long-stemmed pipe over a flame, her hair falling across her eyes. Men sprawl and mutter in the gloom. Here, they say you introduce only your worst enemy to opium. There is an underworld whisper of a new terror: the Pathar Maar, the stone killer, whose victims are the nameless, invisible poor. In the broken city, there are too many to count. Stretching across three decades, with an interlude in Mao's China, it portrays a city in collision with itself. With a cast of pimps, pushers, poets, gangsters and eunuchs, it is a journey into a sprawling underworld written in electric and utterly original prose.

Narcopolis

A meditation on grief, These Errors are Correct is Jeet Thayil's most intimate work to date. In poems of tenderness and rage, time blurs into a continuous present visited by Billy the Kid, the Buddha, Lata Mangeshkar, Jesus and Beethoven, by unnamed protagonists for whom faith and addiction are interchangeable, and by a remote god-like figure who will 'lick / your wound with his infected tongue'. A range of fixed and invented forms--rhymed syllabics, terza rima, ghazals, sonnets, the sestina, the canzone, stealth rhymes--make for a virtuosic, haunting collection. Originally published in 2008, the book has been out of print since 2010. With illustrations by the author, this new edition returns to the reader an essential and timeless book of poems. These Errors are Correct won the 2013 Sahitya Akademi Award.

These Errors Are Correct

Names of the Women

In incandescent prose, award-winning novelist Jeet Thayil tells the story of Newton Francis Xavier, blocked poet, serial seducer of young women, reformed alcoholic (but only just), philosopher, recluse, all-round wild man and India's greatest living painter. At the age of sixty-six, Xavier, who has been living in New York, is getting ready to return to the land of his birth to stage one final show of his work (accompanied by a mad bacchanal). As we accompany Xavier and his partner and muse 'Goody' on their unsteady and frequently sidetracked journey from New York to New Delhi, the venue of the final show, we meet a host of memorable characters-the Bombay poets of the seventies and eighties, 'poets who sprouted from the soil like weeds or mushrooms or carnivorous new flowers, who arrived like meteors, burned bright for a season or two and vanished without a trace', journalists, conmen, murderers, alcoholics, addicts, artists, whores, society ladies, thugs-and are also given unforgettable (and sometimes unbearable) insights into love, madness, poetry, sex, painting, saints, death, God and the savagery that fuels all great art. Narrated in a huge variety of voices and styles, all of which blend seamlessly into a novel of remarkable accomplishment, The Book of Chocolate Saints is the sort of literary masterpiece that only comes along once in a very long time.

A Novel

Narkopolis

In his first collection since English (2004), Jeet Thayil offers his most affecting work to date, a startling meditation on love, grief, and the random dictates of history. In poems shaped by tenderness and rage, time blurs into a continuous present visited by Beethoven and Babur, by unnamed protagonists for whom religion and addiction are interchangeable, and by a remot god-like figure who will lick/your wound with his infected tongue. Thayil uses a stunning range of fixed and invented forms - rhymed syllabics, terza rima, ghazals, sonnets, the sestina, the canzone, stealth rhy,es - to create a poetry of urgency, intimacy and passion. these Errors and Correct is a haunting book by one of the most engaging voices you will read, full of wisdom and regret.

These Errors are Correct

60 Indian Poets

Covers 55 years of Indian poetry in English. This anthology represents not just the major poets of the past half-century - the canonical writers who have dominated Indian poetry and publishing since the 1950s - but also the different kinds of poetry written by an extraordinary range of younger poets who live in many countries as well as in India.

The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets

The narrator in these poems abandons the sectarian histories of 1990's Bombay for the relative clam of New York, only to find himself a witness to September the 11th, 2001. The author's poems refract his vibrant, unique experience through the prism of this tremendous intellect.

Poems

English

'Mercurial, witty, luminous' - DEVIKA REGE 'Thayil's masterpiece' - WILLIAM DALRYMPLE Jeet Thayil's The Elsewhereans is a genre-defying novel that melds fiction, travelogue, memoir, a ghost story, a family saga, photographs and much else into a tale that unfolds across continents and decades. From the backwaters of Kerala to the streets of Bombay, Hong Kong, Paris and beyond, Thayil maps the restless lives of those shaped by separation - both the ones who leave and the ones left behind. A hypnotic meditation on migration, loss, and the fragile threads of identity from one of the most brilliant voices in contemporary literature, The Elsewhereans is a novel of retrieval and reinvention - an elegy for vanished worlds, and a reckoning with the histories we inherit.

A DOCUMENTARY NOVEL

THE ELSEWHEREANS

Jeet Thayil has compiled the definitive anthology of Indian poetry in English. This monumental undertaking, two decades in the making, brings together writers from across the world, a wealth of voices--in dialogue, in soliloquy, in rhetoric, and in play--to present an expansive, encompassing idea of what makes an 'Indian' poet. Included are lost, uncollected, or out of print poems by major poets, essays that place entire bodies of work into their precise cultural contexts, and a collection of classic black and white portraits by Madhu Kapparath. These images, taken over a period of thirty years, form an archive of breathtaking historical scope. They offer the viewer unparalleled intimacy and access to the lives of some of India's greatest poets.

The Penguin Book Of Indian Poets

Narcopolis è tutto quello che uno si immagina, ma ha quasi timore di dire – droga, fumerie d’oppio, sesso e Bombay al centro di tutto – lo splendore della città e la sua desolazione, i bassifondi e il miscuglio di razze, classi, religione, violenza e morte... Insomma, Narcopolis è un grande libro». The Hungry Reader «Tre decenni trascorsi a contemplare Bombay in tutto il suo lussurioso squallore... il vomito, la violenza, il glamour triviale e la terribile bellezza di una città trasformati in qualcosa che si annuncia subito come un vero e proprio classico di culto». Hindustan Times «Coinvolgente fino all’estremo e narrato con una febbrile e furiosa necessità, Narcopolis ci offre un mondo che è ad un tempo fantastico e realistico. Jeet Thayil ha scritto un’opera che può trovare posto solo accanto a un Roberto Bolaño». Alan Warner «La Bombay di Jeet Thayil è una città onirica dai sogni inquieti... Narcopolis muterà per sempre la maniera in cui siamo abituati a guardarla». Hari Kunzru

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize Written in poetic and affecting prose, Jeet Thayil's luminous debut novel charts the evolution of a great and broken metropolis across three decades. A rich, hallucinatory dream that captures Bombay in all its compelling squalor, Narcopolis completely subverts and challenges the literary traditions for which the Indian novel is celebrated. It is a book about drugs, sex, death, perversion, addiction, love, and God and has more in common in its subject matter with the work of William S. Burroughs or Baudelaire than with that of the subcontinent's familiar literary lights. Above all, it is a fantastical portrait of a beautiful and damned generation in a nation about to sell its soul.

Jeet Thayil

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