English, August: An Indian Story - Softcover

Upamanyu Chatterjee

3.78

5,899 ratings by Goodreads

9780571218769: English, August: An Indian Story

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571218768 ISBN 13: 9780571218769

Publisher: Penguin Books/ Faber and Faber, 2011

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Agastya Sen is a young Indian civil servant whose imagination is dominated by women literature and soft drugs. As the novel opens he has been posted to the small provincial town of Madna. English August is a funny, wryly observed account of Agastya Sen's year in the sticks.

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From the Inside Flap:

"...when New York Review Books Classics publishes Upamanyu Chatterjee’s 1988 debut novel, English, August, for the first time in the U.S., Americans will finally have the chance to be in on what readers in England and India have known for years: that the great outpouring of Indian lit over the past decade and a half owes as much to this irreverent, acid-witted book as it does to Salman Rushdie’s magnum opus, Midnight’s Children...A best-seller in India (and later a hit film), English, August struck a chord with a generation of young writers wrestling with the messy sprawl of modern South Asia...English, August is more than a satire. It’s also a novel with resonating concerns about the meaning of maturity in the modern era. ...American readers should identify with the brainy, sarcastic and slightly confused protagonist of English, August as he struggles to find a purpose in a rapidly changing world."—Time Out New York

From the Back Cover:

"English, August is one of the most important novels in Indian writing in English, but not for the usual reasons. Indeed, it’s at war with ‘importance,’ and is one of the few Indian English novels in the last two decades genuinely, and wonderfully, impelled by irreverence and aimlessness. It’s this acutely intelligent conflation of self-discovery with the puncturing of solemnity that makes this book not only a significant work, but a much-loved one." —Amit Chaudhuri

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