Works
Red Earth and Pouring Rain, Chandra's first novel, was inspired by the autobiography of James Skinner, a legendary nineteenth century Anglo-Indian soldier. The novel was written over several years at the writing programs at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Houston. It was published in 1995 by Penguin Books in India; by Faber and Faber in the UK; and by Little, Brown in the United States. Red Earth and Pouring Rain received outstanding critical acclaim, and it won both the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book and the David Higham Prize for Fiction. The novel is named after a poem from the Kuruntokai, an anthology of Classical Tamil love poems.
Love and Longing in Bombay, a collection of short stories, was published in 1997 by the same publishers as Red Earth and Pouring Rain. This collection of stories won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book (Eurasia region), was short-listed for the Guardian Fiction Prize, and was well received by international press and media.
In 2000, Vikram served as co-writer, with Suketu Mehta, for Mission Kashmir, a Bollywood movie directed by his brother-in-law, the award-winning director Vidhu Vinod Chopra, and starring Hrithik Roshan.
Sacred Games, Vikram Chandra's most recent novel, was published in 2008. Set in a sprawling Mumbai, it features Sartaj Singh, a policeman who first appeared in Love and Longing in Bombay. Over 900 pages long, Sacred Games was one of the year's most anticipated new novels and was the subject of a bidding war amongst the leading publishers in India, the UK, and the US.
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Famous quotes containing the word works:
“Reason, the prized reality, the Law, is apprehended, now and then, for a serene and profound moment, amidst the hubbub of cares and works which have no direct bearing on it;Mis then lost, for months or years, and again found, for an interval, to be lost again. If we compute it in time, we may, in fifty years, have half a dozen reasonable hours.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Only the more uncompromising of the mystics still seek for knowledge in a silent land of absolute intuition, where the intellect finally lays down its conceptual tools, and rests from its pragmatic labors, while its works do not follow it, but are simply forgotten, and are as if they never had been.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)
“There is a great deal of self-denial and manliness in poor and middle-class houses, in town and country, that has not got into literature, and never will, but that keeps the earth sweet; that saves on superfluities, and spends on essentials; that goes rusty, and educates the boy; that sells the horse, but builds the school; works early and late, takes two looms in the factory, three looms, six looms, but pays off the mortgage on the paternal farm, and then goes back cheerfully to work again.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)