Join us for prize-winning novelist, Vikram Chandra's, first Philadelphia reading, conversation, and book signing following the triumphant US release of Sacred Games (2007).

Wednesday, April 4, 2007
5-7pm, Russell Weigley Room, 914 Gladfelter Hall

Copies of Chandra's novels will be available for purchase.

Vikram Chandra is a prize-winning writer whose Midas touch reaches across the genres of short-story, novel, criticism, and film writing.

Chandra's debut novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, was published in 1995 to outstanding critical acclaim. It won the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Commonwealth Writer's Prize for Best First Book. A collection of short stories, Love and Longing in Bombay, was published in 1997. The story "Dharma" was awarded the Discovery Prize by the Paris Review and the collection was short-listed for the Guardian Fiction Prize and included in "Notable Books of 1997" by the New York Times Book Review, in "Books of the Year" by the Independent (London), and in "Best Books of the Year" by the Guardian (London). Set against the backdrop of a smoky Bombay bar known as the Fisherman's Rest, the collection's five stories are recounted by a retired civil servant whose journeys into the city's underworld explore the many forms in which "love" explodes in one of the world's most thriving metropolises.

The underworld returns once again in Chandra's 2006 novel, Sacred Games, in which Sartaj Singh, a police detective, faces off over a PA system in Bombay's hot summer sun with a fabled underworld boss. In pursuing the case against Gaitonde the don, Singh encounters belles and Bollywood, politics and prose across the novel's 900+ riveting pages. Some readers of this crime novel, detective story, and political thriller have complained about the length, being forced to ration their intake of this ultimately finite novel that they wished could go on forever. A tour de force of modern Anglophone writing, Sacred Games reinvents a new purpose and pleasure for the novel today.

Citing Sacred Games for the Hutch Crossword Award for Fiction, its judges noted: "This is a Big Book—and not just because you could stun an ox with it. It makes a great metropolis and its cast of thousands real in an idiom that makes questions of Englishness and Indianness and authenticity seem silly and beside the point. The sheer, unapologetic, unitalicised, ballsiness of the language is one of the most purely enjoyable aspects of this extraordinary book. The reader doesn’t suspend disbelief: plausibility is a small virtue: this epic novel gives its reader whole worlds to inhabit."

When chastised by a renowned critic for putatively selling out as a Third World Cosmopolite to Western interests, Chandra's resounding response, published in The Boston Review, to what he called the cultural commissar's"anxiety about the anxiety of Indianness" became an instant classic for its perceptive analysis of what he titled "The Cult of Authenticity."

Chandra teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. His writing credits include co-scripting the Bollywood hit, Mission Kashmir (2000, dir. Vidhu Vinod Chopra) starring Sanjay Dutt and Hrithik Roshan. He was educated at Mayo College, Ajmer; St. Xavier's College, Mumbai; Pomona College, Claremont; Columbia University; Johns Hopkins; and the University of Houston. Chandra's work has been translated in a dozen languages.

More on Chandra, including a bibliography, can be located at http://www.vikramchandra.com/ and http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Chandra.html.