Voices in the City

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About the Book Winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award and twice nominated for the prestigious Booker Prize, Anita Desai (b.1937) has been active on the literary scene for over four decades now. Her second novel, Voices in the City, is still considered her best work till date. Most of her principal works focus on women as the chief the protagonists in their restricted male dominated surroundings and their plight as helpless birds of cage. Voices in the City are a case in point. TO quote Sunday Times, London, "There is a convincing fury about this novel," based on the life of middle-class intellectuals in Calcutta which the present critical study seeks to explore, analyse and examine from all angles.

Shakti Batra, formerly Vice-Principal of Dyal Singh College (University of Delhi). He has taught at The Kabul University and the International University of Kyrgyzstan, Bishkek. Now associated with Surjeet Publications, Batra has to his credit critical studies of Amitav Ghosh : The Shadow Lines, Aphra Behn's : The Rover, Bernard Shaw : Candida, Bertolt Brecht : The Good Woman of Szechuan, D. H. Lawrence : The Rainbow, Dario Fo : Accidental Death of An Anarchist, Eugene lonesco : Rhinoceros, F Scott Fitzgerald : The Great Gatsby, Feodor, Dostoevsky : Crime and Punishment, Gabriel Garcia Marquez : The Chronicle of a Death Foretold, J. D. Salinger : The Catcher in the Rye, Jean Genet : The Balcony, Joseph Conrad : Heart of Darkness, Johan August Strindberg : Miss Julie, John Isben : Ghosts, Leo Tolstoy : Anna Karenina, Margaret Atwood : Surfacing, Nathaniel Hawthorne : The Scarlet Letter, Neruda, Walcott and Atwood : Poets of the Americas, Ngugi Wa Thiong'o & Micere Githae Mugo : The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, Oscar Wilde : The Importance of Being Ernest, Tagore : The Home & the World, Salman Rushdie : The Midnight's Children, Tennessee Williams : The Glass Managerie, Tennessee Williams : A Street Car Named Desire, W Goldings : Lord of the Flies, William -Faulkner : The Sound and the Fury, William Shakespeare : Tempest, Wole Soyinka : Kongi's Harvest, Wole Soyinka : The Lion and the Jewel

Preface Anita Desai (b. 1937) is in the forefront of the second generation of Indian novelists writing in English. She has recently published her fourteenth novel, The Zigzag Way-the first to be located wholly outside India. But Anita Desai has never faltered in her quiet dedication to her art ever since the publication of her second novel, Voices in the City, which describes the corrosive effects of city upon an Indian family-Nirode, Monisha and Amla-brought up by an over-indulgent mother. It is still considered her best work.

The present critical study takes up this haunting and consummate work of art and explores its various facets that have become hallmarks of Anita Desai's fiction over the years. Voices in the City has been assessed and analysed from every possible angle-textual, socio-economic and political, characterisation and the delineation of women folk. It is hoped that it will meet all the requirements of our students from the point of view of university examinations at the graduate and the post-graduate levels.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages