This collection features the remarkable short fiction of a Nobel Prize winner, bringing together their most acclaimed works in a single volume. Enhanced by an insightful introduction from the author, the anthology showcases the depth and creativity of their storytelling, offering readers a unique glimpse into the themes and styles that define their literary legacy.
A gripping masterpiece, hailed as one of the twentieth century's finest novels.
Concentrating mainly on India, the Americas, Africa and the Diaspora, this wonderful collection of essays is a clear-eyed and magnificent introduction to this writer's extraordinary world.
`V.S. Naipaul is the world's writer, a master of language and perception' New York Times Book Review
An astonishingly candid book from the Nobel Laureate about what has shaped his interpretation of literature and the world.
And Other Comic Inventions
A cultural history describing how folklore studies and the music industry helped to create a musical color line in the South, associating certain genres with particular racial and ethnic identities.
Like all of V. S. Naipaul's 'travel' books, encompasses amuch larger narrative and purpose: to judge the effects of belief (in indigenous animisms, the foreign religions of Christianity and Islam, the cults of leaders and mythical history) upon the progress of civilization
The history of Trinidad begins with a delusion: the belief that somewhere nearby on the South American mainland lay El Dorado, the mythical kingdom of gold. In this extraordinary and often gripping book, V. S. Naipaul–himself a native of Trinidad–shows how that delusion drew a small island into the vortex of world events, making it the object of Spanish and English colonial designs and a mecca for treasure-seekers, slave-traders, and revolutionaries. Amid massacres and poisonings, plunder and multinational intrigue, two themes emerge: the grinding down of the Aborigines during the long rivalries of the El Dorado quest and, two hundred years later, the man-made horror of slavery. An accumulation of casual, awful detail takes us as close as we can get to day-to-day life in the slave colony, where, in spite of various titles of nobility, only an opportunistic, near-lawless community exists, always fearful of slave suicide or poison, of African sorcery and revolt. Naipaul tells this labyrinthine story with assurance, withering irony, and lively sympathy. The result is historical writing at its highest level.
A dazzling portrait of the life and times of James Hogg. Electric Shepherd is a likeness of James Hogg, Scottish Borderer and international literary star, who shared an epoch and an environment with Walter Scott.