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Tags: naipaul

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  A House for Mr. Biswas

  by V. S. Naipaul

  The early masterpiece of V. S. Naipaul’s brilliant career, A House for Mr. Biswas is an unforgettable story inspired by Naipaul's father that has been hailed as one of the twentieth century's finest novels. In his forty-six short years, Mr. Mohun Biswas has been fighting against destiny to achieve some semblance of independence, only to face a lifetime of calamity. Shuttled from one residence to another after... (more)
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  A Bend in the River

  by V. S. Naipaul

  'Brilliant and terrifying' - "Observer". I had to be the man who was doing well and more than well, the man whose drab shop concealed some bigger operation that made millions. I had to be the man who had planned it all, who had come to the destroyed town at the bend in the river because he had foreseen the rich future. 'Salim, the narrator, is a young man from an Indian family of traders long resident on the coast... (more)
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  Half a Life

  by V. S. Naipaul

  One of the finest living writers in the English language, V. S. Naipaul gives us a tale as wholly un- expected as it is affecting, his first novel since the exultantly acclaimed A Way in the World , published seven years ago. Half a Life is the story of Willie Chandran, whose father, heeding the call of Mahatma Gandhi, turned his back on his brahmin heritage and married a woman of low caste—a disastrous union... (more)
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  Beyond Belief

  Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

  by V. S. Naipaul

  "Brilliant. . . . A powerfully observed, stylistically elegant exploration." -- The New York Times A New York Times Notable Book of the Year "The book's strength lies in Naipaul's extraordinary ability as a storyteller to draw striking portraits of a cross section of individuals."-- The Boston Globe Fourteen years after the publication of his landmark travel narrative Among the Believers , V. S. Naipaul... (more)
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  The Enigma of Arrival

  A Novel in Five Sections

  by V. S. Naipaul

  The autobiographical novel of a journey from the British colony of Trinidad to the ancient countryside of England.
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  Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents

  by Paul Theroux

  This heartfelt and revealing account of Paul Theroux's thirty-year friendship with the legendary V. S. Naipaul is an intimate record of a literary mentorship that traces the growth of both writers' careers and explores the unique effect each had on the other. Built around exotic landscapes, anecdotes that are revealing, humorous, and melancholy, and three decades of mutual history, this is a personal account of... (more)
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  In a Free State

  by V. S. Naipaul

  No writer has rendered our boundariless, post-colonial world more acutely or prophetically than V. S. Naipaul, or given its upheavals such a hauntingly human face. A perfect case in point is this riveting novel, a masterful and stylishly rendered narrative of emigration, dislocation, and dread, accompanied by four supporting narratives. In the beginning it is just a car trip through Africa. Two English... (more)
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  India : A Wounded Civilization

  by V. S. Naipaul

  In 1975, at the height of Indira Gandhi’s “Emergency,” V. S. Naipaul returned to India, the country his ancestors had left one hundred years earlier. Out of that journey he produced this concise masterpiece: a vibrant, defiantly unsentimental portrait of a society traumatized by centuries of foreign conquest and immured in a mythic vision of its past. Drawing on novels, news reports, political memoirs, and his... (more)
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  The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul

  by Patrick French

  Patrick French has been granted unique access to V.S. Naipaul's private papers and his personal recollections. With great feeling for Naipaul's formidable body of work, he has produced a luminous account of the most compelling literary figure of the last fifty years. Beginning in rich and evocative detail in Trinidad, where V.S. Naipaul was born into an Indian family, French examines early privations, Naipaul's... (more)
• India A Million Mutinies NowV.S. Naipaul

  

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  India A Million Mutinies Now

  by V.S. Naipaul

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  The Mimic Men

  by V. S. Naipaul

  A profound novel of cultural displacement, The Mimic Men masterfully evokes a colonial man’s experience in a postcolonial world. Born of Indian heritage and raised on a British-dependent Caribbean island, Ralph Singh has retired to suburban London, writing his memoirs as a means to impose order on a chaotic existence. His memories lead him to recognize the paradox of his childhood during which he secretly... (more)
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  Finding the Center

  by V. S. Naipaul

  In the essay, "Prologue to an Autobiography," Naipaul recounts his beginnings as a writer and renders a touching portrait of his father. In "The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro," a study of the Ivory Coast, he delineates two sections of the modern African mind: the Westernized "day" mind and that of the ageless, magic-haunted "night." PW called both narratives "small works of art." January Copyright 1985 Reed Business... (more)
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  The Mystic Masseur

  by V. S. Naipaul

  In this slyly funny and lavishly inventive novel–his first–V. S. Naipaul traces the unlikely career of Ganesh Ramsumair, a failed schoolteacher and impecunious village masseur who in time becomes a revered mystic, a thriving entrepreneur, and the most beloved politician in Trinidad. To understand a little better, one has to realize that in the 1940s masseurs were the island’s medical practitioners of choice. As... (more)
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  India: A Million Mutinies Now

  by V. S. Naipaul

  A look at India explores the ways different individuals have been affected by the numerous frictions present in Indian society, the contradictions and compromises of religious faith, and more. Reprint. NYT.
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  A Turn in the South

  by V. S. Naipaul

  In the tradition of political and cultural revelation V.S. Naipaul so brilliantly made his own in Among The Believers, A Turn In The South, his first book about the United States, is a revealing, disturbing, elegiac book about the American South -- from Atlanta to Charleston, Tallahassee to Tuskegee, Nashville to Chapel Hill. "Naipaul's chapters honor the diversity that marks the South.... Conservatives and... (more)
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  A Writer's People

  Ways of Looking and Feeling

  by V. S. Naipaul

  Born in Trinidad of Indian descent, a resident of England for his entire adult life, and a prodigious traveler, Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul has always faced the challenges of “fitting one civilisation to another.” Here, in his first book of nonfiction since 2003, he gives us an eloquent, candid, wide-ranging narrative that delves into this sometimes inadvertent process of creative and intellectual assimilation. ... (more)
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  Guerrillas

  by V. S. Naipaul

  A novel of colonialism and revolution, death, sexual violence and political and spiritual impotence.
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  The Middle Passage

  Impressions of Five Societies: British, French and Dutch in the West Indies and South America

  by V. S. Naipaul

  In 1960 the government of Trinidad invited V. S. Naipaul to revisit his native country and record his impressions. In this classic of modern travel writing he has created a deft and remarkably prescient portrait of Trinidad and four adjacent Caribbean societies–countries haunted by the legacies of slavery and colonialism and so thoroughly defined by the norms of Empire that they can scarcely believe that the... (more)
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  Miguel Street

  by V. S. Naipaul

  “A stranger could drive through Miguel Street and just say ‘Slum!’ because he could see no more.” But to its residents this derelict corner of Trinidad’s capital is a complete world, where everybody is quite different from everybody else. There’s Popo the carpenter, who neglects his livelihood to build “the thing without a name.” There’s Man-man, who goes from running for public office to staging his own... (more)
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  Among the Believers

  An Islamic Journey

  by V. S. Naipaul

  Naipaul's controversial account of his travels through the Islamic world was hailed by The New Republic as "the most notable work on contemporary Islam to have appeared in a very long time."