Author: R K Narayan
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 1988
Language: English
Pages: 240
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0140107916
Description
This volume is a pick of thirty years of essays from Narayan, India's greatest English language novelist.
Narayan is better known as a novelist, but his essays are as delightful and enchanting as his stories and novels. Introducing this selection of essays, Narayanan writes,' I have always been drawn to the personal essay in which you see something of the author himself apart from the theme.'
A Writer's Nightmare is the ,marvelous result of Narayan's liking for the personal essay. In this book he tackles subjects such as weddings, mathematics, coffee, umbr5ellas, teachers, newspapers, monkeys, lovers - all sorts of topics, simple and not so simple, which reveal the very essence of India.
Contents
Introduction
Higher Mathematics
Fifteen Years
Allergy
Horses and Others
The Vandal
To a Hindi Enthusiast
'No School Today'
The Non-Musical Man
On Humour
Reception at Six
In the Confessional
Bride-groom Bargains
The Scout
Gradening Without Tears
Private Faces
Coffee Worries
Looking One's Age
The Great Basket
Of Trains and Travellers
A Library Without Books
A Writer's Nightmare
Umbrella Devotee
Next Sunday
The Sycophant
The Maha
Headache
The Critical Faculty
Beauty and the Beast
Memory
Streat Names
Reluctant Guru
My Educational Outlook
Trigger - Happy
Better Late
The Winged Ants
Taxing Thoughts
Elephant in the Pit
The Lost Umbrella
The Newspaper Habit
Castes : Old and New
Curiosity
The Golden Age
Rambles in a Library
At an Auctioneers
Pride of Place
House, House
A Picture of Years
LATER ESSAYS
Sorry, no room
God and the Atheist
Oh Funny Encounters
The Testament of a Walker
Love and Lovers
A Matter of Status
History is a Delicate Subject
Junk
Of Age and Birthdays
Pickpockets
Monkeys
A Literary Alchemy
The Writerly Life
The Nobel Prize and all that
Misguided 'Guide'
Indira Gandhi
When India was a Colony
India and America