April 26th: Amit Chaudhuri—Freedom Song, A Strange and Sublime Address, Afternoon Raag
Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, Amit Chaudhuri presents reissues of his early works Freedom Song, A Strange and Sublime Address, and Afternoon Raag in conversation with James Yeh
This event will take place live at 192 Books at 192 10th Avenue, between 21st and 22nd avenue, on Friday, April 26th at 6:00 PM ET. Seating is on a first come, first served basis. The discussion will be streamed directly on this page. A recording will be archived.
Amit Chaudhuri—Freedom Song, A Strange and Sublime Address, Afternoon Raag (NYRB 2024)
A boy spends a summer and a winter with his parents in a Bombay high-rise, and spends other summers in Calcutta immersed in the more traditional life of his uncle's extended family ... A young man at Oxford, whose memories of home in Bombay bring both comfort and melancholy, faces a choice between "clinging to my Indianness, or letting it go, between being nostalgic or looking toward the future" ... The members of a Calcutta family are occupied with the task of finding the right woman for the twenty-eight-year-old son who would rather occupy himself with politics... In these three short novels - Freedom Song, Afternoon Raag, and A Strange and Sublime Address Chaudhuri illuminates the surprisingly nuanced intimate worlds of middle-class Indian men, women, and children. The novels brim with the author's evocations of place and time, and his radiant descriptions and subtle explorations of the expected and surprising events of daily life; the effects of family connectedness and separation; the desires and demands of youth and age; the things and events that confirm "how mysterious the world is at every moment"; the hidden complexities of a fully lived inner life. From these elements Amit Chaudhuri shapes mesmerizing narratives, uncovering the remarkable in what might otherwise seem merely quotidian.
Photo: Geoff Pugh
Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, essayist, poet, and musician. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he lives in Calcutta and the United Kingdom. Sojourn is his eighth novel. Among his other works are three books of essays, the most recent of which is The Origins of Dislike; a study of D.H. Lawrence’s poetry; a book of short stories, Real Time; two works of non-fiction, the latest of which is Finding the Raga; and four volumes of poetry, including New and Selected Poems (New York Review Poets, 2023). Formerly a professor of contemporary literature at the University of East Anglia, Chaudhuri is now a professor of creative writing and the director of the Centre for the Creative and the Critical at Ashoka University, as well as the editor of www.literaryactivism.com. He has made several recordings of Indian classical and experimental music, and has been awarded the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, the Indian government’s Sahitya Akademi Award, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
James Yeh is a writer, editor, and journalist. His fiction and nonfiction appears in New York magazine, the New York Times, the Guardian, the Drift, NOON, and McSweeney's Quarterly. A former editor at McSweeney's Quarterly, the Believer, and VICE, he currently teaches writing at Columbia University and is at work on a novel about unconventional parenting, fatherhood, and eldercare.