{"product_id":"calcutta-two-years-in-the-city-9780307270245","title":"Calcutta: Two Years in the City","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eCalcutta: Two Years in the City\u003c\/strong\u003e by Chaudhuri, Amit. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780307270245.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe award-winning author Amit Chaudhuri has been widely praised for the beauty and subtle power of his writing and for the ways in which he makes “place” as complex a character as his men and women. Now he brings these gifts to a spellbinding amalgam of memoir, reportage, and history in this intimate, luminous portrait of Calcutta.\n\nChaudhuri guides us through the city where he was born, the home he loved as a child, the setting of his acclaimed novels—a place he now finds captivating for all the ways it has, and, perhaps more powerfully, has not, changed. He shows us a city relatively untouched by the currents of globalization but possessed of a “self-renewing way of seeing, of inhabiting space, of apprehending life.” He takes us along vibrant avenues and derelict alleyways; introduces us to intellectuals, Marxists, members of the declining haute bourgeoisie, street vendors, domestic workers; brings to life the city’s sounds and smells, its architecture, its traditional shops and restaurants, new malls and hotels. And, using the historic elections of 2011 as a fulcrum, Chaudhuri looks back to the nineteenth century, when the city burst with a new vitality, and toward the politics of the present, finding a city “still not recovered from history” yet possessed of a singular modernity.\nChaudhuri observes and writes about Calcutta with rare candor and clarity, making graspable the complex, ultimately ineluctable reasons for his passionate attachment to the place and its people.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Knopf","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44424861876277,"sku":"ByrdShop_0307270246","price":31.12,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780307270245_9e843122-844a-4218-9416-430ca82cb16f.jpg?v=1784231158","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/calcutta-two-years-in-the-city-9780307270245","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}