Amit Chaudhuri - "Incompleteness: New and Selected Essays" - Srikanth Reddy
Schedule
Tue, 28 Apr, 2026 at 04:00 pm
UTC-05:00Location
5751 S Woodlawn Ave, Chicago, IL, United States, Illinois 60637 | Chicago, IL
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Amit Chaudhuri will discuss "Incompleteness: New and Selected Essays," "A New World," and "The Immortals." He will be joined in conversation by Srikanth Reddy. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion. At the Co-op.
About "Incompleteness: New and Selected Essays:" A brilliant prose stylist and keen innovator of literary form, Amit Chaudhuri is one of the most singular voices in contemporary letters whose essays, like his fiction, defy categorization and display a sensibility uniquely his own. "Incompleteness" gathers some of Chaudhuri’s best essays and criticism from more than two decades. In these pieces, Chaudhuri writes on everything from Rabindranath Tagore and Joni Mitchell to the troubles with Indian modernity, to globalisation’s appropriation of narrative storytelling over poetic incompleteness. Drolly humorous, and filled with unexpected insight, Incompleteness is incontrovertible proof that Chaudhuri is one of our most original and gifted interpreters of the world after globalization.
About "A New World:" "A New World" is a tale of a man recovering from a difficult divorce and a story about the way we live now. Set in the 1990s, the book describes a world become, in the wake of the Cold War, more international and interconnected in which, at the same time, connection has grown ever more tenuous and harder to sustain. Jayojit, born and bred in India, is a professor of economics at a college in the American Midwest. His ex-wife has moved to California, taking their young son, Bonny, with her. For summer vacation, Jayojit has brought Bonny to Calcutta to visit his mother and father, a retired admiral in the Indian navy. The heat of summer has moved in when the two arrive; the monsoon will come before they leave. During the course of this stay, Jayojit will brood over the past and try to imagine the future, while enduring the inconveniences and misunderstandings and absurdities of family life and occasionally venturing out, alone or with Bonny, to explore the changing landscape of the city. Present throughout Chaudhuri's pages are questions central to life and to the life of the novel: What is freedom and what is responsibility? What, beyond the commotion of the moment, are the commonalities that bind us together?
About "The Immortals:" Music is central to the work of Amit Chaudhuri, who is well-known as a musician and performer himself. In his brilliantly exploratory novels, character and action develop not through the conventions of plot but through the free play of paragraph, sentence, and phrase, and in "The Immortals" it is music that supplies the theme for a series of entrancing fictional variations. Shyamji is the scion of a celebrated Rajasthani dynasty of singers—his father, an Indian classical musician, became renowned as the "heavenly singer"—but his own sights are set on a level of material well-being his father could not achieve. In 1980s Bombay, the business capital of India, he scrapes by as a music teacher to the rich. Among his students are Mallika, the wife of a corporate executive, and her son, Nirmalya, who will embrace the cause of Indian classical music, threatened by the modern world of money, with the fanatical devotion only a sixteen-year-old can muster. Comic and lyrical, the novel is at once a Bombay novel—"the Bombay novel," as Pankaj Mishra calls it in his introducion—a story of growing up, a picture of a milieu, and a resonant tribute in kind to the most mysterious and universal of the arts.
About the author: Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, essayist, poet, and musician. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he lives in Calcutta and the United Kingdom. He has written eight novels, the latest of which is "Sojourn." Among his other works are three books of essays, including "The Origins of Dislike;" a study of D.H. Lawrence's poetry; a book of short stories, "Real Time;" two works of nonfiction, including "Finding the Raga;" and four volumes of poetry. Formerly a professor of contemporary literature at the University of East Anglia, Chaudhuri is now a professor of creative writing and the director of the Centre for the Creative and the Critical at Ashoka University, as well as the editor of literaryactivism.com. He has made several recordings of Indian classical and experimental music, and has been awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Lost Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, the Indian government's Sahitya Akademi Award, and the James Tait Black Prize.
About the interlocutor: Srikanth Reddy is a poet, critic, and literary editor on faculty in the Department of English and the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Chicago. He is the author of the poetry collections "Underworld Lit" (2020), "Voyager" (2011), and "Facts for Visitors" (2004), and a book of criticism, "Changing Subjects: Digressions in Modern American Poetry" (2012). A book of lectures on poetry and painting, "The Unsignificant," was published in Fall 2024. He is poetry editor of The Paris Review, and series editor of the Phoenix Poets book series at the University of Chicago Press.
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