English August: Indian Story - Hardcover

Chattergee, Upamanyu

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0571151019 ISBN 13: 9780571151011

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 1988

Synopsis

Agastya Sen, known to friends by the English name August, is a child of the Indian elite. His friends go to Yale and Harvard. August himself has just landed a prize government job. The job takes him to Madna, “the hottest town in India,” deep in the sticks. There he finds himself surrounded by incompetents and cranks, time wasters, bureaucrats, and crazies. What to do? Get stoned, shirk work, collapse in the heat, stare at the ceiling. Dealing with the locals turns out to be a lot easier for August than living with himself. English, August is a comic masterpiece from contemporary India. Like A Confederacy of Dunces and The Catcher in the Rye, it is both an inspired and hilarious satire and a timeless story of self-discovery.

About this title

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

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0571151019
• ISBN 13: 9780571151011
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 291