AUGUST 2008: NEW BOOK FROM AMIT CHAUDHURI

CLEARING A SPACE: REFLECTIONS ON INDIA, LITERATURE AND CULTURE, by Amit Chaudhuri

To the many admirers of his fiction, Amit Chaudhuri seems all the more remarkable because of the excellence and accessibility of his non-fiction. Clearing a Space brings together many of Chaudhuri’s best essays, written over the past decade in journals such as the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement. This body of his work has been widely praised and reveals a literary project of great value in understanding Indian and global modernity.

‘This extraordinary and wide-ranging collection, through a series of highly-focused aperçus, puts in question the key terms of self-understanding of much modern literature. This and much else makes this book a treasure trove of acute and thought-provoking perceptions.’ Charles Taylor

‘Amit Chaudhuri...asks hard questions of himself as well as others, and he engages us as readers with the warmth and acuity of his observations across a wonderful range of writing.’ Gillian Beer

‘... a wonderful key to the understanding of the vitality and specificity of Indian modernity and of the modern transformation of Indian civilization...worth the serious attention of scholars in the social sciences as well as the humanities.’ Shmuel Eisenstadt

‘Whether making music or writing prose, Amit Chaudhuri offers a distinctive spiritual history of modernity. These collected meditations—which are as elegantly fastidious as they are intellectually adventurous—confirm him as one of our most provocative and consistently interesting artists.’ Pankaj Mishra

A BLACK KITE BOOK / ISBN 81-7824-237-0 / Rs 395 / 325pp / Hardback / August 2008 / For sale in South Asia only / Copublished with Peter Lang

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