Dear Friends:
Announcing the release of the critically acclaimed 'Maximum City
Bombay Lost and Found' by Suketu Mehta. The book will be launched in
public readings and discussions with the author in Mumbai on 20 and 21
September, and in other cities in India and the U.S. in the coming
month. For the book tour schedule and to find the venue nearest to you,
please go to http://suketumehta.com/tour.html
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
By Suketu Mehta
Suketu Mehta left Bombay at the age of 14. Twenty-one years later,
having lived in Paris, London and New York's East Village, he returned
to rediscover the only city he calls his own. The result is this
stunning, brilliantly illuminating portrait of the megalopolis and its
people-a book, seven years in the making, that is as vast, as diverse,
as rich in experience, incident and sensation as the city itself.
Mehta approaches the life and lives of Bombay from unexpected angles.
He takes us into the underworld where Muslim and Hindu gangs manage to
wrest some control of the Byzantine political and commercial systems of
the city. He follows the life of a bar dancer, whose childhood of
poverty and abuse left her no choice but the one she made. He journeys
on the famed local trains and out onto the streets and footpaths, where
the essential story of Bombay is played out every day by the countless
migrants who come in search of a better life. He opens windows into the
inner sanctums of Bollywood and the alternative universe at its
fringes. And through it all-as each individual story unfolds-we hear
Mehta's own story: of the mixture of love, frustration, fascination,
and intense identification he feels for and with Bombay. Candid,
impassioned, insightful, both surprisingly funny and heart-rending,
Maximum City is a revelation of a complex and ever-changing world: the
continent of Bombay.
DATE:
MONDAY 20 SEPTEMBER 2004
VENUE:
Crossword Books
Ground Floor, Mohammed Bhai Mansion
Kemps Corner, Below the Fly-Over
Pedder Road, Mumbai 400026
TIME:
6.00 p.m.
ORGANISED BY:
Crossword Bookstores
http://www.crosswordbookstores.com/
DATE:
TUESDAY 21 SEPTEMBER 2004
VENUE:
National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) Auditorium
Opposite Prince of Wales Museum
Shyama Prasad Mukherji Chowk, Kala Ghoda
Colaba, Mumbai 400020
TIME:
7.00 p.m.
ORGANISED BY:
TimeOut Mumbai
http://timeoutmumbai.net/
(to reserve a seat, please call the TimeOut Mumbai hotline on
+91.22.5660.1200)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
SUKETU MEHTA is a fiction writer and journalist based in New York. He
has won the Whiting Writers Award, the O. Henry Prize, and a New York
Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for his fiction. Mehta's work has
been published in the New York Times Magazine, Granta, Harper's
magazine, Time, Condé Nast Traveler, and The Village Voice, and has
been featured on National Public Radio's All Things Considered. Mehta
also owrote Mission Kashmir, a Bollywood movie. Mehta was born in
Calcutta and raised in Bombay and New York. He is a graduate of New
York University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He is currently writing
an original screenplay for 'The Goddess,' a Merchant-Ivory film
starring Tina Turner.
REVIEWS:
"It's the best book yet written about that great, ruined metropolis, my
city as well as his, and it deserves to be very widely read." -- Salman
Rushdie
A gripping, compellingly readable account of a love affair with a
city: I couldn't put it down. -- Amitav Ghosh
Maximum City is the remarkable debut of a major new Indian writer.
Humane and moving, sympathetic but outspoken, it's a shocking and
sometimes heartbreaking book, teeming with extraordinary stories. --
William Dalrymple
"The book is part urban history, part nightmare, part memoir, almost
all stunningly written." -- Sreenivasan Jain in Time Out Mumbai
To contact the author send an e-mail to [email protected] and for more
information about the book, the release tour schedule, and ordering
information, go to http://www.suketumehta.com
_____
CRIT (Collective Research Initiatives Trust) Announcements List
http://lists.crit.org.in/mailman/listinfo/announcer
http://www.crit.org.in