Through most of literary history, great writers have either tended to look down upon the art of storytelling […]
Amit Chaudhuri
By Somak Ghoshal “I feel no nostalgia,” says the narrator of Amit Chaudhuri’s new book, Friend of My […]
The eighth edition of Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival commencing from January 15 would be attended among others by […]
By Palash Krishna Mehrotra Is any year a good year for books? Despite doomsday predictions, the book is […]
On 16 March, The Guardian published a review of Anjali Joseph’s novel The Living. It was a glowing review. “An exceptional, unexpected work”, was just the title.
Samantha Johns was livid. She shot off an email to The Guardian, and sent a copy of it to HuffPost India. Here it is:
Dear Ms Armistead,
I read with some interest the glowing review of Anjali Joseph’s new novel The Living by Amit Chaudhuri.
Comparing her to Woolf and to Tagore, the reviewer draws out her numerous strengths. However, nowhere does it outline, in passing or as endnote, that the reviewer was also her tutor, a mentor to her dissertation, when she was a candidate at the University of East Anglia. Subsequently, Joseph worked with Chaudhuri on a UEA teaching program in India; they are colleagues.
The eighth edition of the five–day ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival (ZJLF) is all set to kick off with a special curtain raiser in the city. Indian English author-academic and Sahitya Akademi Awardee Amit Chaudhuri will be discussing his latest novel Odysseus Abroad in a conversation with poet, novelist, journalist and DNA India’s editor-in-chief CP Surendran.
Lahore-based author Bilal Tanweer’s maiden novel The Scatter Here is Too Great has bagged the 2014 Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize.
The award carries a cash component of Rs. 2 lakh.
His novel was picked from a shortlist of six books by a jury of authors Amit Chaudhuri, Aatish Taseer and Mridula Koshy.
Readers who have been praying fervently for an antidote to Chetan Bhagat novels will have ample reason to believe in the existence of God: Outlookindia.com
Readers who have been praying fervently for an antidote to Chetan Bhagat novels will have ample reason to believe in the existence of God should they chance upon Amit Chaudhuri’s Odysseus Abroad. Chaudhuri’s latest offering gives us the student life scrubbed clean of all vulgar excesses—no campus, no middle-class hankering for IIT or MBA degrees, no girlfriends (half or whole), no unnecessary melodrama and twists and turns of plot, nothing that could be accused of being in poor taste. This is the quiet romance of a young man in love with his own thoughts, delivered in flawless English.
Primal Woman, a collection of translated short stories by the late Sunil Gangopadhyay reveals his preoccupation with man’s inhumanity: Open
Sunil Gangopadhyay is a literary institution. An atheist, a radical, co-opted by the establishment. Happily co-opted, it must be said, and by the end a pillar of that establishment—Poet Sunil, as Ginsberg called him in September on Jessore Road, turned president of the Sahitya Akademi. This is literary life (or perhaps just life): at one time, you’re the firebrand, dismissing Tagore as soft and sentimental, founding experimental literary journals, inveighing against the status quo; and then, before you know it, you’re ‘the man’, an abuser of power, rapacious, venal; a toad squatting balefully atop ‘Literature’.
Amit Chaudhuri matches the glorious nothingness of Afternoon Raag at last with his beautiful new novel about a bookish young Bengali Everyman and his uncle in London: Open
This is the story of Ananda, a 22-year old Indian man and an aspiring poet in exile, full of the usual contradictions. He is a student of English literature in London but at odds with the city. He reads poetry even in the bathroom, but despises novels. He has not bothered to read The Odyssey and though he has waded through Ulysses, he did not enjoy it, except briefly when a customs man at JFK discovered it in his luggage. Yet, with characteristic playfulness, Amit Chaudhuri layers over the persona of his protagonist that most inter-textual of archetypes, Odysseus.
