The Inheritance of Loss

The Inheritance of Loss
Author: Kiran Desai
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
Total Pages: 394
Release: 2007-12-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1555845916

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize: An “extraordinary” novel “lit by a moral intelligence at once fierce and tender” (The New York Times Book Review). In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas, an embittered old judge wants only to retire in peace. But his life is upended when his sixteen-year-old orphaned granddaughter, Sai, arrives on his doorstep. The judge’s chatty cook watches over the girl, but his thoughts are mostly with his son, Biju, hopscotching from one miserable New York restaurant job to another, trying to stay a step ahead of the INS. When a Nepalese insurgency threatens Sai’s new-sprung romance with her tutor, the household descends into chaos. The cook witnesses India’s hierarchy being overturned and discarded. The judge revisits his past and his role in Sai and Biju’s intertwining lives. In a grasping world of colliding interests and conflicting desires, every moment holds out the possibility for hope or betrayal. Published to extraordinary acclaim, The Inheritance of Loss heralds Kiran Desai as one of our most insightful novelists. She illuminates the pain of exile and the ambiguities of postcolonialism with a tapestry of colorful characters and “uncannily beautiful” prose (O: The Oprah Magazine). “A book about tradition and modernity, the past and the future—and about the surprising ways both amusing and sorrowful, in which they all connect.” —The Independent

Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard

Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard
Author: Kiran Desai
Publisher:
Total Pages: 209
Release: 1998
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780871137111

Sampath Chawla, a young postal worker who never feels as though he fits into the small Indian town into which he is born, one day climbs up a tree, only to become a famous holy man

Anita Desai and Her Fictional World

Anita Desai and Her Fictional World
Author: Neeru Tandon
Publisher: Atlantic Publishers & Dist
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2008
Genre: Indic literature (English)
ISBN: 9788126908424

Today Anita Desai Is Recognised For Her Originality, Versatility And The Indigenous Flavour Of Her Character-Portrayal That She Brings To Her Work. Her Women Characters Are Real Flesh And Blood Protagonists Who Make You Look At Them With Awe And With Their Relationships To Their Surroundings, Their Society, Their Men, Their Children, Their Families, Their Mental And Psychological Make-Ups And Themselves. The Present Book Purports To Be A Pioneering Attempt To Evaluate Desai S Fiction And Fictional Art From Various Points Of View And Assesses Her Contribution To The Indian-English Fiction. What Is Unique About This Book Is The Attempt To Include Desai S Complete Fictional Oeuvre From Her Maiden Attempt Cry, The Peacock (1963) Till Her Latest Published Work The Zigzag Way (2004). Her Novels Of Four Decades Have Been Divided Into Different Sections For A Focused Study.The Present Critical Anthology Of Dr. Neeru Tandon On Anita Desai Is An Admirable Effort On The Presentation Of A Coherent And Comprehensive Assessment Of Anita Desai As A Powerful Indian English Fiction Writer. In Her Collection She Has Included Certain Burning Topics Of The Day Such As Male-Female Dichotomy, Existentialist Vision, Religion And Culture, Concept Of Marriage And Narrative Technique In The Fiction Of Anita Desai. The Uncomplicated Language And The Natural Flow Of Words Make For Easy Reading. Since Dasai Is Prescribed In The Syllabus In Most Of The Universities Of India, Both The Teachers And The Students Will Find This Book Extremely Useful, And The Research Scholars Will Also Find It Very Interesting And Purposeful.

Critical Responses to Kiran Desai

Critical Responses to Kiran Desai
Author: Sunita Sinha
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2009
Genre:
ISBN: 9788126912421

Contributed articles on the works of Kiran Desai, b. 1971, Booker Prize 2006 winner.

Family Fictions and World Making

Family Fictions and World Making
Author: Sreya Chatterjee
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2021-04-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 100036559X

Family Fictions and World Making: Irish and Indian Women’s Writing in the Contemporary Era is the first book-length comparative study of family novels from Ireland and India. On the one hand, despite an early as well as late colonial experience, Ireland is often viewed exclusively within a metropolitan British and Europe-centered frame. India, on the other hand, once seen as a model of decolonization for the non-Western world, has witnessed a crisis of democracy in recent years. This book charts the idea of "world making" through the fraught itineraries of the Irish and the Indian family novel. The novels discussed in the book foreground kinship based on ideological rather than biological ties and recast the family as a nucleus of interests across national borders. The book considers the work of critically acclaimed women authors Anne Enright, Elizabeth Bowen, Mahasweta Devi, Jennifer Johnston, Kiran Desai and Molly Keane. These writers are explored as representative voices for the interwar years, the late-modern period, and the globalization era. They not only push back against the male nationalist idiom of the family but also successfully interrogate family fiction as a supposedly private genre. The broad timeframe of Family Fictions and World Making from the interwar period to the globalization era initiates a dialogue between the early and the current debates around core and periphery in postcolonial literature.

In Custody

In Custody
Author: Anita Desai
Publisher: Random House India
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2012-09-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 8184003293

In this sensitive portrayal of human nature, Anita Desai, one of India’s foremost writers, paints an intimate portrait of lives impacted by the quest for identity and purpose. Deven, a Hindi lecturer in small-town Mirpore, lives a humdrum existence. A chance to interview Nur—India’s greatest living Urdu poet—offers him an escape from his dreary life. But the Nur he meets is an enfeebled man, surrounded by clashing wives and preying sycophants. Deven’s decision to be the custodian of Nur’s verse gives birth to an unusual alliance between the two. Stimulating and thought provoking, In Custody is a brilliant parable lamenting the gradual corrosion of culture and tradition in the face of modernity, and a dazzling study of the complexity of human relationships.

The Artist of Disappearance

The Artist of Disappearance
Author: Anita Desai
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 181
Release: 2011
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0547577451

Award-winning novelist Anita Desai explores time and transformation in these three artful novellas

National Identity and Cultural Representation in the Novels of Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai

National Identity and Cultural Representation in the Novels of Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai
Author: Sonali Das
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 147
Release: 2018-04-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1527509907

This book is the first of its kind to examine the theories of nation and national identity in both the West (according to the theories of Benedict Anderson and Salman Rushdie) and in the East (in the light of the works of Jawaharlal Nehru) as they apply to the novels of Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai. The second part of the twentieth century witnessed a new interface between fiction and history called “New History”. It brought into its purview the hitherto marginalized sections of society like slaves, peasants, workers, women, and children. Whereas the subalterns in The Inheritance of Loss are disempowered by the brunt of globalisation and neo-colonialism, the subalterns in The God of Small Things face the ire of the deep-seated divisions based on caste and gender bias in a postcolonial society. In addition, this book also deals with contemporary social issues like individual identity in a multicultural world where cultures and nature converge into myriad ways of living. It will be of immense benefit to MA and MPhil students all over India, as well as to PhD scholars and teachers of English literature both in India and abroad.

The White Tiger

The White Tiger
Author: Aravind Adiga
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2008-04-22
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1416562737

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE The stunning Booker Prize–winning novel from the author of Amnesty and Selection Day that critics have likened to Richard Wright’s Native Son, The White Tiger follows a darkly comic Bangalore driver through the poverty and corruption of modern India’s caste society. “This is the authentic voice of the Third World, like you've never heard it before” (John Burdett, Bangkok 8). The white tiger of this novel is Balram Halwai, a poor Indian villager whose great ambition leads him to the zenith of Indian business culture, the world of the Bangalore entrepreneur. On the occasion of the president of China’s impending trip to Bangalore, Balram writes a letter to him describing his transformation and his experience as driver and servant to a wealthy Indian family, which he thinks exemplifies the contradictions and complications of Indian society. Recalling The Death of Vishnu and Bangkok 8 in ambition, scope, The White Tiger is narrative genius with a mischief and personality all its own. Amoral, irreverent, deeply endearing, and utterly contemporary, this novel is an international publishing sensation—and a startling, provocative debut.

Fasting, Feasting

Fasting, Feasting
Author: Anita Desai
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2012-10-31
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1448104556

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 1999 BOOKER PRIZE Uma, the plain, spinster daughter of a close-knit Indian family, is trapped at home, smothered by her overbearing parents and their traditions, unlike her ambitious younger sister Aruna, who brings off a 'good' marriage, and brother Arun, the disappointing son and heir who is studying in America. Across the world in Massachusetts, life with the Patton family is bewildering for Arun in the alien culture of freedom, freezers and paradoxically self-denying self-indulgence.