Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul

Download Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781349379194
Total Pages : 188 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (791 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul by : Imraan Coovadia

Download or read book Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul written by Imraan Coovadia and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the ways in which problems of imaginative authority and authorship structure the fiction and non-fiction of V.S. Naipaul and resonate in postcolonial literature. Imraan Coovadia argues that the post-colonial societies Naipaul studies in novels such as A Bend in the River and Guerillas are defined by the fragility of their authority. Coovadia demonstrates through close reading, how Naipaul, born in Trinidad to an Indian family and resident of the United Kingdom, asserts his imaginative authority over many different situations across the globe through a complex literary rhetoric.

Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul

Download Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 0230622461
Total Pages : 188 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (36 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul by : I. Coovadia

Download or read book Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul written by I. Coovadia and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-06-22 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the ways in which problems of imaginative authority and authorship structure the fiction and non-fiction of V.S. Naipaul and resonate in postcolonial literature. Imraan Coovadia argues that the post-colonial societies Naipaul studies in novels such asA Bend in the RiverandGuerillasare defined by the fragility of their authority. Coovadia demonstrates through close reading, how Naipaul, born in Trinidad to an Indian family and resident of the United Kingdom,asserts hisimaginative authority over many different situations across the globe through a complex literary rhetoric.

V.S. Naipaul, Caribbean Writing, and Caribbean Thought

Download V.S. Naipaul, Caribbean Writing, and Caribbean Thought PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192605305
Total Pages : 220 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (926 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis V.S. Naipaul, Caribbean Writing, and Caribbean Thought by : William Ghosh

Download or read book V.S. Naipaul, Caribbean Writing, and Caribbean Thought written by William Ghosh and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-12 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: V.S. Naipaul was one of the most influential and controversial writers of the twentieth century. His writings on colonialism and its aftermath, on migration and landscape, and on cultural loss and creativity, were both admired and criticised by a wide global audience. But what of his relationship to the region of his birth? Born in Trinidad, of Indian ancestry, and spending his professional life in England, Naipaul could be dismissive of his Caribbean background. He presented himself as a citizen of nowhere, or else, of the globalized, postcolonial world. However, this obscures his intense competition, fierce disagreements and close collaboration with other Caribbean intellectuals, both as a schoolchild in colonial Trinidad, and as an internationally celebrated author. V.S. Naipaul, Caribbean Writing, and Caribbean Thought looks again at Naipaul's relationship with his birthplace. It shows that that the decolonising Caribbean was the crucible in which Naipaul's style and outlook were formed. Moreover, understanding Naipaul's place in the history of the region's politics and letters sheds new light on the work of celebrated contemporaries, Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite, George Lamming and Maryse Condè, Elsa Goveia and Eric Williams, Sylvia Wynter and C.L.R. James. Literary criticism, intellectual biography, and an essay in the history of ideas, this book offers a new account of Caribbean thought in the decades after independence. It reveals a literary culture of creative vibrancy, in an era of unprecedented change.

Handbook of British Travel Writing

Download Handbook of British Travel Writing PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110498979
Total Pages : 627 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (14 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Handbook of British Travel Writing by : Barbara Schaff

Download or read book Handbook of British Travel Writing written by Barbara Schaff and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-09-07 with total page 627 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook offers a systematic exploration of current key topics in travel writing studies. It addresses the history, impact, and unique discursive variety of British travel writing by covering some of the most celebrated and canonical authors of the genre as well as lesser known ones in more than thirty close-reading chapters. Combining theoretically informed, astute literary criticism of single texts with the analysis of the circumstances of their production and reception, these chapters offer excellent possibilities for understanding the complexity and cultural relevance of British travel writing.

The Enigma of Arrival

Download The Enigma of Arrival PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307744035
Total Pages : 448 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (77 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Enigma of Arrival by : V. S. Naipaul

Download or read book The Enigma of Arrival written by V. S. Naipaul and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-04-20 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nobel Prize-winning author distills his wide experience of countries and peoples into a moving account of the rites of passage endured by all people and all communities undergoing change or decay. • "Naipaul's finest work." —Chicago Tribune "A subtly incisive self-reckoning." —The Washington Post Book World The story of a writer’s singular journey – from one place to another, and from one state of mind to another. At the midpoint of the century, the narrator leaves the British colony of Trinidad and comes to the ancient countryside of England. And from within the story of this journey – of departure and arrival, alienation and familiarity, home and homelessness – the writer reveals how, cut off from his “first” life in Trinidad, he enters a “second childhood of seeing and learning.” Clearly autobiographical, yet woven through with remarkable invention, The Enigma of Arrival is as rich and complex as any novel we have had from this exceptional writer. "The conclusion is both heart-breaking and bracing: the only antidote to destruction—of dreams, of reality—is remembering. As eloquently as anyone now writing, Naipaul remembers." —Time "Far and away the most curious novel I've read in a long time, and maybe the most hypnotic book I've ever read." —St. Petersburg Times

A Writer's People

Download A Writer's People PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307269485
Total Pages : 209 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (72 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis A Writer's People by : V. S. Naipaul

Download or read book A Writer's People written by V. S. Naipaul and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-11-02 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nobel Prize-winning author delivers an eloquent, candid, wide-ranging narrative that delves into the sometimes inadvertent process of creative and intellectual assimilation. “Bracing, surprising.... A meditation on art and life.” —The New York Review of Books V. S. Naipaul has always faced the challenges of "fitting one civilization to another." In A Writer's People, he takes us into this process that has shaped both his writing and his life. Naipaul discusses the writers to whom he was exposed early on—Derek Walcott, Gustave Flaubert, and his father, among them—and his first encounters with literary culture. He illuminates the ways in which the writings of Gandhi, Nehru, and other Indian writers both reveal and conceal the authors themselves and their nation. And he brings the same scrutiny to bear on his own life: his early years in Trinidad; the empty spaces in his family history; his ever-evolving reactions to the more complicated India he would encounter for the first time at age thirty.

The World Is What It Is

Download The World Is What It Is PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Viking Canada
ISBN 13 : 9780670045297
Total Pages : 480 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (452 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The World Is What It Is by : Patrick French

Download or read book The World Is What It Is written by Patrick French and published by Viking Canada. This book was released on 2008-08-12 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning with a richly detailed portrait of Naipaul's childhood in Trinidad, Patrick French gives us the boy born to an Indian family who wins a scholarship to Oxford at the age of 17. London in the 1950s offers his first literary success, but homesickness almost defeats Vidia, his narrow escape aided by Patricia Hale, an English woman who will stand by him for 4 decades, even as he embarks on a 24-year love affair which will feed his dizzying creativity. Informed by exclusive access to the subject's private papers and personal recollections, French's revelatory biography does full justice to an enigmatic genius.

The First Naipaul World Epics

Download The First Naipaul World Epics PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9354352650
Total Pages : 344 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (543 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The First Naipaul World Epics by :

Download or read book The First Naipaul World Epics written by and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-07-31 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The plethora of commentary from highly respected voices in a broad cross-section of academic disciplines, which V. S. Naipaul's death on 11 August 2018 elicited, ranged so widely, both cognitively and emotionally, that if a student of literature, unfamiliar with the Naipaulian era, read it all, they would have failed to make sense of the divergences. Allegations included that he 'was a cruel man', 'a scarred man', 'the darkest dungeons of colonialism incarnate: self-punishing, self-loathing, world-loathing, full of nastiness and fury', 'a ventriloquist for the nastiest cliches European colonialism had devised to rule the world with arrogance and confidence' and so on. On the other hand, writers referred to Naipaul as a 'brilliant writer's writer', one 'who holds a mirror of imagination unto society to capture a certain view of reality' and one who 'has turned the genre of the travelogue into an art form'. Debates aside, many of us appreciate the value of Naipaul's writing to the deepest possible comprehension of the imperial impulse and the myriad reasons it manifested as colonialism. The First Naipaul World Epics is the first in a series of critical collections that aim to demonstrate this value. At the same time, the series seeks to help the new student through the quagmire of divergent opinions his personality and writing have generated.

Far from Mecca

Download Far from Mecca PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
ISBN 13 : 1978806647
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (788 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Far from Mecca by : Aliyah Khan

Download or read book Far from Mecca written by Aliyah Khan and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-17 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean is the first academic work on Muslims in the English-speaking Caribbean. Khan focuses on the fiction, poetry and music of Islam in Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica, combining archival research, ethnography, and literary analysis to argue for a historical continuity of Afro- and Indo-Muslim presence and cultural production in the Caribbean: from Arabic-language autobiographical and religious texts written by enslaved Sufi West Africans in nineteenth century Jamaica, to early twentieth century fictions of post-indenture South Asian Muslim indigeneity and El Dorado, to the 1990 Jamaat al-Muslimeen attempted government coup in Trinidad and its calypso music, to judicial cases of contemporary interaction between Caribbean Muslims and global terrorism. Khan argues that the Caribbean Muslim subject, the "fullaman," a performative identity that relies on gendering and racializing Islam, troubles discourses of creolization that are fundamental to postcolonial nationalisms in the Caribbean.

Civilizing War

Download Civilizing War PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
ISBN 13 : 081013604X
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (11 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Civilizing War by : Nasser Mufti

Download or read book Civilizing War written by Nasser Mufti and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities, awarded by the Council of Graduate Schools Honorable Mention for the 2019 Sonya Rudikoff Prize, awarded by the Northeast Victorian Studies Association Civilizing War traces the historical transformation of civil war from a civil affair into an uncivil crisis. Civil war is today synonymous with the global refugee crisis, often serving as grounds for liberal-humanitarian intervention and nationalist protectionism. In Civilizing War, Nasser Mufti situates this contemporary conjuncture in the long history of British imperialism, demonstrating how civil war has been and continues to be integral to the politics of empire. Through comparative readings of literature, criticism, historiography, and social analysis, Civilizing War shows how writers and intellectuals of Britain’s Anglophone empire articulated a “poetics of national rupture” that defined the metropolitan nation and its colonial others. Mufti’s tour de force marshals a wealth of examples as diverse as Thomas Carlyle, Benjamin Disraeli, Friedrich Engels, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, V. S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, and Michael Ondaatje to examine the variety of forms this poetics takes—metaphors, figures, tropes, puns, and plot—all of which have played a central role in Britain’s civilizing mission and its afterlife. In doing so, Civilizing War shifts the terms of Edward Said’s influential Orientalism to suggest that imperialism was not only organized around the norms of civility but also around narratives of civil war.

The Writer and the World

Download The Writer and the World PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Vintage Canada
ISBN 13 : 030737064X
Total Pages : 722 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (73 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Writer and the World by : V. S. Naipaul

Download or read book The Writer and the World written by V. S. Naipaul and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 722 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For forty years V. S. Naipaul has been traveling and, through his writing, creating one of the most wide-ranging and sustained meditations on our world. Now, for the first time, his finest shorter pieces of reflection and reportage -- nearly all of them heretofore out of print -- are collected in one volume. With an abiding faith in the redemptive power of modernity balanced by a sense of wonder about the past, Naipaul has explored an astonishing variety of societies and peoples through the many-sided prism of his own experience. Whether writing about the Muslim invasions of India, Mobutu’s mad reign in Zaire, or the New York mayoral elections, he has demonstrated again and again that no one has a shrewder intuition of the ways in which power works, of the universal relation of the exploiter and the exploited. And no one has put forth a more consistently eloquent defense of the dignity of the individual and the value of civilization. Infused with a deeply felt humanism, The Writer and the World attests powerfully not only to Naipaul’s status as the great English prose stylist of our time but also to his keen, often prophetic, understanding.

The Loss of El Dorado

Download The Loss of El Dorado PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307789330
Total Pages : 425 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (77 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Loss of El Dorado by : V. S. Naipaul

Download or read book The Loss of El Dorado written by V. S. Naipaul and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-03-16 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this masterpiece about Trinidad, the Nobel Prize-winning author has “given us a lesson in history [and] shown us how it is best written” (The New York Times). 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 Way in the World

Download A Way in the World PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307789292
Total Pages : 419 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (77 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis A Way in the World by : V. S. Naipaul

Download or read book A Way in the World written by V. S. Naipaul and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-04-20 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nobel Prize-winning author—and "one of literature's great travelers" (Los Angeles Times)—spans continents and centuries to create what is at once an autobiography and a fictional archaeology of colonialism. "Dickensian … a brilliant new prism through which to view (Naipaul's) life and work."—The New York Times “Most of us know the parents or grandparents we come from. But we go back and back, forever: we go back all of us to the very beginning: in our blood and bone and brain we carry the memories of thousands of beings.” So observes the opening narrator of A Way in the World, and it is this conundrum—that the bulk of our inheritance must remain beyond our grasp—which suffuses this extraordinary work of fiction. Returning to the autobiographical mode he so brilliantly explored in The Enigma of Arrival, and writing here in the classic form of linked narrations, Naipaul constructs a story of remarkable resonance and power, remembrance and invention. It is the story of a writer’s lifelong journey towards an understanding of both the simple stuff of inheritance — language, character, family history — and the long interwoven strands of a deeply complicated historical past: “things barely remembered, things released only by the act of writing.” What he writes — and what his release of memory enables us to see — is a series of extended, illuminated moments in the history of Spanish and British imperialism in the Caribbean: Raleigh’s final, shameful expedition to the New World; Francisco Miranda’s disastrous invasion of South America in the eighteenth century; the more subtle aggressions of the mid-twentieth-century English writer Foster Morris; the transforming and distorting peregrinations of Blair, the black Trinidadian revolutionary. Each episode is viewed through the clarifying lens of the narrator’s own post-colonial experience as a Trinidadian of Indian descent who, during the twilight of the Empire, immigrates to England, reinventing himself in order to escape the very history he is intent upon telling.

Reading and Writing

Download Reading and Writing PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : New York Review of Books
ISBN 13 : 9780940322387
Total Pages : 92 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (223 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Reading and Writing by : V. S. Naipaul

Download or read book Reading and Writing written by V. S. Naipaul and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2000-02-28 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I was eleven, no more, when the wish came to me to be a writer; and then very soon it was a settled ambition. But for the young V. S. Naipaul, there was a great distance between the wish and its fulfillment. To become a writer, he would have to find ways of understanding three very different cultures: his family's half-remembered Indian homeland, the West Indian colonial society in which he grew up, and the wholly foreign world of the English novels he read. In this essay of literary autobiography, V. S. Naipaul sifts through memories of his childhood in Trinidad, his university days in England, and his earliest attempts at writing, seeking the experiences of life and reading that shaped his imagination and his growth as a writer. He pays particular attention to the traumas of India under its various conquerors and the painful sense of dereliction and loss that shadows writers' attempts to capture the country and its people in prose. Naipaul's profound reflections on the relations between personal or historical experience and literary form, between the novel and the world, reveal how he came to discover both his voice and the subjects of his writing, and how he learned to turn sometimes to fiction, sometimes to the travel narrative, to portray them truthfully. Along the way he offers insights into the novel's prodigious development as a form for depicting and interpreting society in the nineteenth century and its diminishing capacity to do the same in the twentiethÑa task that, in his view, passed to the creative energies of the early cinema. As a child trying to read, I had felt that two worlds separated me from the books that were offered to me at school and in the libraries: the childhood world of our remembered India, and the more colonial world of our city. ... What I didn't know, even after I had written my early books of fiction ... was that those two spheres of darkness had become my subject. Fiction, working its mysteries, by indirections finding directions out, had led me to my subject. But it couldn't take me all the way. -V.S. Naipaul, from Reading & Writing

V.S. Naipaul

Download V.S. Naipaul PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Atlantic Publishers & Dist
ISBN 13 : 9788126901722
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (17 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis V.S. Naipaul by : Mittapalli Rajeshwar

Download or read book V.S. Naipaul written by Mittapalli Rajeshwar and published by Atlantic Publishers & Dist. This book was released on 2002 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Constant Concern Of Naipaul S Novels And Travel Writing Is The Negotiation Of Where The Individual Is Situated. Many Of His Fictional Figures Remain Unhoused, Displaced, Uprooted With No Distinct Place Called Home To Be Proud Of And Are, Therefore, Located On The Margins Of Fixed And Shifting Identities.In Formal Terms, Naipaul Experiments Along The Boundaries Of Fiction And Non-Fiction, In Particular Travel Writing, And Often Fuses Genres To Give Birth To New Ones.On The Occasion Of Naipaul S Winning The Nobel Prize For Literature This Anthology Presents A Perceptive Assessment Of Some Of His Important Works Of Fiction And Travel Writing And Puts Into Perspective His Contribution To Literature As A Whole.

V.S. Naipaul

Download V.S. Naipaul PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Atlantic Publishers & Dist
ISBN 13 : 9788126901661
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (16 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis V.S. Naipaul by : Mohit Kumar Ray

Download or read book V.S. Naipaul written by Mohit Kumar Ray and published by Atlantic Publishers & Dist. This book was released on 2004 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: V.S. Naipaul Has Claimed That All His Work Is Really One And He Has Been Writing One Big Book All These Years; Also, Considering The World He Has Stepped Into And The World He Has To Look At, He Cannot Be A Professional Novelist In The Old Sense. In Early Youth Naipaul Took Up The Vocation Of A Writer As His Religion And, Since The Beginning Five Decades Ago, Has Drawn On His Intensely Personal Experience Of An Uprooted Person Adrift In The World, His Experience Of The Two Worlds To None Of Which He Could Really Belong An Experience That Imparts The Authentic Voice To His Works Both Non-Fiction And Fiction Enriched By A Distinct Autobiographical Flavour. Naipaul Himself Is Split Into His Characters In Whom Are Manifested Subtle Shades Of His Emotions And Traits. He Is Accidental Man, Dangling Man, History Man And The Mimic Man All Rolled Into One. Naipaul Is Also One Of Literature S Great Travellers, And His Absorption Into The Experience Of Rootlessness, The Alienating Effects Of Colonial Past On Today S Postcolonial People Has Taken Him To Africa, South America, India And All Over The World Not In Search Of Roots But In Search Of Rootlessness, And Has Yielded A Rich Harvest Of Travelogues Which Are About Much More Than Travel.An Author Of A Large Number Of Fictional And Non-Fictional Works, Naipaul Continues To Surprise, Excite, Provoke And Move Readers At Every Turn Of His Literary Voyage. Naipaul Has Unseverable Emotional Bond With India Which Remains For Him An Area Of Pain, An Ache For Which One Has A Great Tenderness Yet From Which He Wishes To Separate Himself. The World Of V.S. Naipaul Is The World Of Two Worlds. The Present Volumes Of Papers On Naipaul, Led By Naipaul S Nobel Lecture, Offer Illuminating Perspectives And Interesting Explorations Into This Rich, Enigmatic, Sad, Hilarious And Fascinating World Of Naipaul.

Literary Occasions

Download Literary Occasions PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Vintage Canada
ISBN 13 : 0307370658
Total Pages : 234 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (73 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Literary Occasions by : V. S. Naipaul

Download or read book Literary Occasions written by V. S. Naipaul and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2012-03-26 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rich collection of essays on reading, writing, and identity from our finest writer in English, V. S. Naipaul. Literary Occasions charts more than half a century of personal enquiry into the mysteries of written expression, and of fiction in particular. Literary Occasions brings together some true gems of literary criticism and personal reflection. Reflecting on the full scope of his career, V. S. Naipaul takes us through his beginnings as a writer: his boyhood experiences of reading books and his first efforts at writing them; the early glimmers and evolution of ideas about the proper relations of particular literary forms to particular cultures and identities; and his father’s influence, revealed in an intriguing preface to the only book he ever published. These moving and thoughtful pieces are accompanied by Naipaul’s profound and severe discussions of other authors, including his signal essay on Conrad, and the classic “Indian Autobiographies.” The collection is completed by “Two Worlds,” the magnificent Nobel Address, in which Naipaul considers the indivisibility of the literary and the personal. Sustained by extraordinary powers of expression and thought, Literary Occasions is both a subtle recollection of Naipaul’s past, and the only available organized statement of his literary ideas. A valuable companion to last year’s The Writer and the World, this is an essential volume from a man who has devoted his life to the written word.