Description
| Product ID: | 9780008670146 |
| Product Form: | Hardback |
| Country of Manufacture: | GB |
| Title: | The Cooking of Books |
| Subtitle: | A Literary Memoir |
| Authors: | Author: Ramachandra Guha |
| Page Count: | 272 |
| Subjects: | Autobiography: writers, Autobiography: literary, Diaries, letters and journals, Memoirs, Writing and editing guides, History, History, Publishing and book trade, Diaries, letters & journals, Memoirs, Writing & editing guides, Postwar 20th century history, from c 1945 to c 2000, 21st century history: from c 2000 -, Publishing industry & book trade, India, c 1945 to c 2000 (Post-war period), 21st century |
| Description: | Select Guide Rating It is not often that an author and his editor strike up a relationship which survives forty years of epistolary exchanges and intellectual sparring. It is not often that an author and his editor strike up a relationship which survives forty years of epistolary exchanges and intellectual sparring. The strangely enduring and occasionally fractious friendship which developed between the famously outspoken historian Ramachandra Guha and his reticent editor Rukun Advani is the subject of this quite eccentric and thoroughly compelling literary memoir.It started in Delhi in the early 1980s, when Guha was an unpublished PhD scholar, and Advani a greenhorn editor with Oxford University Press. It blossomed through the 1990s, when Guha grew into a pioneering historian of the environment and of cricket, while also writing his pathbreaking biography of Verrier Elwin. Over these years Advani was Guha’s most constant confidant, his most reliable reader. He encouraged him to craft and refine the literary style for which Guha became internationally known – narrative histories which have made vast areas of scholarship popular and accessible.Four decades later, though he no longer publishes his books, Advani remains Guha’s most trusted literary adviser. Yet they also disagree ferociously on politics, human nature, and the shape of their commitment to India. They usually make up – because it just wouldn’t do to allow such an odd relationship to die.Built around letters and emails between an outgoing and occasionally combative scholar and a reclusive editor prone to private outbursts of savage sarcasm, this book is never short of the kind of wit, humour, and drollery that has been strangled by contemporary political correctness. |
| Imprint Name: | William Collins |
| Publisher Name: | HarperCollins Publishers |
| Country of Publication: | GB |
| Publishing Date: | 2024-01-18 |
