{"title":"Amit Chaudhuri","description":"Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, essayist, poet, and musician. He is a professor of creative writing and the director of the Centre for the Creative and the Critical at Ashoka University. His most recent book is Sweet Shop: New and Selected Poems, 1985-2023, published by NYRB Poets.","products":[{"product_id":"the-immortals-paperback","title":"The Immortals - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eTwo families in 1980s Bombay--one making ends meet in the old world of Indian classical music, the other thriving in a booming new world of corporate luxury--intersect in this lyrical novel of art and commerce, capturing a city (and country) in a state of change.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eMusic is central to the work of Amit Chaudhuri, who is well-known as a musician and performer himself. In his brilliantly exploratory novels, character and action develop not through the conventions of plot but through the free play of paragraph, sentence, and phrase, and in \u003ci\u003eThe Immortals\u003c\/i\u003e it is music that supplies the theme for a series of entrancing fictional variations. Shyamji is the scion of a celebrated Rajasthani dynasty of singers--his father, an Indian classical musician, became renowned as the \"heavenly singer\"--but his own sights are set on a level of material well-being his father could not achieve. In 1980s Bombay, the business capital of India, he scrapes by as a music teacher to the rich. Among his students are Mallika, the wife of a corporate executive, and her son, Nirmalya, who will embrace the cause of Indian classical music, threatened by the modern world of money, with the fanatical devotion only a sixteen-year-old can muster. Comic and lyrical, the novel is at once a Bombay novel--\"\u003ci\u003ethe \u003c\/i\u003eBombay novel,\" as Pankaj Mishra calls it in his introducion--a story of growing up, a picture of a milieu, and a resonant tribute in kind to the most mysterious and universal of the arts.","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50101244362975,"sku":"9781681379678","price":22.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/yvm0uqNkKx9781681379678.webp?v=1781068546"},{"product_id":"a-new-world-paperback","title":"A New World - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA newly divorced professor returns home to Calcutta and contends with his disconnection from his son, his parents, and life itself in this atmospheric, lushly descriptive novel of loss and the difficulty of continuing on in spite of it.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eA New World\u003c\/i\u003e is a tale of a man recovering from a difficult divorce and a story about the way we live now. Set in the 1990s, the book describes a world become, in the wake of the Cold War, more international and interconnected in which, at the same time, connection has grown ever more tenuous and harder to sustain. Jayojit, born and bred in India, is a professor of economics at a college in the American Midwest. His ex-wife has moved to California, taking their young son, Bonny, with her. For summer vacation, Jayojit has brought Bonny to Calcutta to visit his mother and father, a retired admiral in the Indian navy. The heat of summer has moved in when the two arrive; the monsoon will come before they leave. During the course of this stay, Jayojit will brood over the past and try to imagine the future, while enduring the inconveniences and misunderstandings and absurdities of family life and occasionally venturing out, alone or with Bonny, to explore the changing landscape of the city. Present throughout Chaudhuri's pages are questions central to life and to the life of the novel: What is freedom and what is responsibility? What, beyond the commotion of the moment, are the commonalities that bind us together?","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50102324199647,"sku":"9781681379630","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/khsTW2j41f9781681379630.webp?v=1781079391"}],"url":"https:\/\/blackandbarhe.com\/collections\/amit-chaudhuri.oembed","provider":"Black \u0026 Barhe Bookstore","version":"1.0","type":"link"}