Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

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)

The Overcrowded Barracoon

by V. S Naipaul

An Area of Darkness (Vintage)

by V.S. Naipaul

A classic of modern travel writing, An Area of Darkness is Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul’s profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland and an extraordinarily perceptive chronicle of his first encounter with India. Traveling from the bureaucratic morass of Bombay to the ethereal beauty of Kashmir, from a sacred ice cave in the Himalayas to an abandoned temple near Madras, Naipaul encounters a dizzying... (more)

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)

The Writer and the World: Essays

by Pankaj Mishra

Spanning four decades and four continents, this magisterial volume brings together the essential shorter works of reflection and reportage by our most sensitive, literate, and undeceivable observer of the post-colonial world. In its pages V. S. Naipaul trains his relentless moral intelligence on societies from India to the United States and sees how each deals with the challenges of modernity and the seductions of... (more)

Reading and Writing: A Personal Account

by V.S. Naipaul

In this essay of literary autobiography, V.S. Naipaul sifts through memories of his childhood in Trinidad, his university days in Oxford, and his struggles as a young, poor and inexperienced writer in London. He describes his responses to his family's native India, particularly his horror at the poverty and misery that he encountered on his first visit. He modestly reflects on the different possibilities... (more)

Between Father and Son: Family Letters

by Gillon R. Aitken

V. S. Naipaul is perhaps the most famous émigré writer since Vladimir Nabokov, and though he always spoke and wrote English, his self-imposed exile to England from his native Trinidad represented a cultural shift as profound as learning to think in another language. In this moving, novel-like correspondence, we witness the great writer’s early transformation from an expatriate adrift to a world-renowned man of... (more)

Beyond Belief : Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

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)

The Middle Passage (Vintage)

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)

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."

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: nonfiction: v.s. naipaul (nobel laureate)

India a Wounded Civilization

by V.S. Naipaul

The Overcrowded Barracoon

by V. S Naipaul

An Area of Darkness (Vintage)

by V.S. Naipaul

A Turn in the South

by V.S. Naipaul

The Writer and the World: Essays

by Pankaj Mishra

Reading and Writing: A Personal Account

by V.S. Naipaul

Between Father and Son: Family Letters

by Gillon R. Aitken

Beyond Belief : Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

by V.S. Naipaul

The Middle Passage (Vintage)

by V.S. Naipaul

Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey

by V. S. Naipaul