Critics' Opinion:
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Published Aug 1995
542 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Vikram Chandra's Red Earth and Pouring Rain is an unforgettable reading experience, a contemporary Thousand and One Nights - with an eighteenth-century warrior-poet (now reincarnated as a typewriting monkey) and an Indian student home from college in America switching off as our Scheherazades. Ranging from bloody battles in colonial India to college anomie in California, from Hindu gods to MTV, Chandra's novel is engrossing, enthralling, impossible to put down - a remarkable meditation on quests and homecomings, good and evil, storytelling and redemption.
"This is an astonishing and brilliant debut." - Publishers Weekly.
"As each story leads to another, Chandra's multifaceted narrative spins and whirls as hectically and alluringly as a kaleidoscope, leaving us a bit dazed if impressed." - Library Journal.
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Melanie Abrams
Vikram Chandra was born in 1961 in New Delhi. and completed most of his secondary education at Mayo College, a boarding school in Ajmer, Rajasthan. After a short stay at St. Xavier's College in Mumbai, he came to the United States as an undergraduate student. In 1984, he graduated from Pomona College (in Claremont, near Los Angeles) with a magna cum laude BA in English, with a concentration in creative writing. He then attended the Film School at Columbia University in New York. While in the Columbia library he happened upon the autobiography of Colonel James "Sikander" Skinner, a legendary nineteenth century soldier, born of an Indian mother and a British father. This book inspired him to write his first novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain, most...
... Full Biography
Link to Vikram Chandra's Website
Name Pronunciation
Vikram Chandra: Vik (rhymes with sick)-rum, Chund-rah
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