Details

ISBN-10: 0679444629
ISBN-13: 9780679444626
Publisher: Everyman's Library
Publish Date: 10/17/1995
Dimensions: 8.35" L, 5.56" W, 1.38" H

Midnight’s Children: Introduction by Anita Desai

Introduction by: Anita Desai

Hardcover

Price: $30.00

Overview

‘BEST OF THE BOOKER’ AWARD WINNER – This towering classic of international literature is at once a riveting family saga and an astonishing evocation of a vast land and its people.

“One of the most important books to come out of the English-speaking world in this generation.” –The New York Review of Books

Saleem Sinai, the hero of Midnight’s Children, is one of the thousand and one children born in India at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the dawn of its independence from British rule–the moment, in the words of its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, when India had her “”tryst with destiny.”” The twists and turns of this destiny form the springboard from which Salman Rushdie launches into his celebrated fantasia of our modernity.

At once a fairy tale, a furious political satire, and a meditation on the ways in which time and change both shape and are shaped by the life of a single individual, Midnight’s Children announced the triumphant return of epic storytelling to our highly evolved literary tradition. With its central themes of displacement and indeterminacy, and its highly original use of a polyglot vocabulary absorbed form three distinct but overlapping cultures, this book anticipated and to a certain extent defined the multifarious, dislocated, ever-expanding world in which, increasingly, we all live.

Midnight’s Children won the Booker Prize in 1981 and then in 2008 it was named “”The Best of the Booker,”” the best book to have won the prize in the forty years of its existence.”
Everyman’s Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author’s life and times.

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Reviews
FROM THE NEW INTRODUCTION BY Anita Desai:
"Rushdie's writing resembles a horse at full gallop that will not halt and wait. He creates an epic by turning his characters into symbols and archetypes so that their histories are lived out at several levels at one time-real and fantastic, metaphorical and symbolic . . . He is a writer of an epic-secular, irreligious, irreverent, subversive, both comic and profoundly serious . . . in short, an epic of our times."

"Huge, vital, engrossing . . . in all senses a fantastic book." –THE SUNDAY TIMES LONDON

"In Salman Rushdie . . . India has produced a glittering novelist-one with startling imaginative and intellectual resources, a master of perpetual storytelling. Like García Márquez . . . he weaves a whole people's capacity for carrying its inherited myths-and new ones that it goes on generating-into a kind of magic carpet . . . Saleem Sinai . . . is dramatizing his past life as a prophecy, even universalizing his history as a mingling of farce and horror and matching it with thirty years of the Indian crowd's collective political history . . . As a tour de force his fantasy is irresistible." –V.S. Pritchett, THE NEW YORKER

"One of the most important books to come out of the English-speaking world in this generation." –THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

More Reviews

Details

ISBN-10: 0679444629
ISBN-13: 9780679444626
Publisher: Everyman's Library
Publish Date: 10/17/1995
Dimensions: 8.35" L, 5.56" W, 1.38" H
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