THE PATNA MANUAL OF STYLE: STORIES

by Siddharth Chowdhury

Category: Fiction
Price: Rs. 295

In these nine interlinked stories we meet the not so quintessential Patna man—Hriday Thakur, Literature junkie, aspiring writer, inveterate lover of women and rain; Jishnu da, his acquaintance from Delhi University, who is now an ‘importer of blondes’; Samuel Crown, the fastidious proofreader who mentors Hriday and instils in him an irrevocable love for the art of ‘book-making’; the parade of women in Hriday’s life: austere, doe-eyed Charulata, love of his youth, the one who got away; Chitrangada, his wife, who works hard to be accepted in his world of books, art, politics and activism; the beautiful Anjali Singh Nalwa, ex-flame who is now a fiery, controversial novelist; Imogen Burns, the intrepid chronicler of graveyards; Sadaf Khan Abdali, who loves the smell of Listerine early in the morning, and ‘Sophia Loren’, dream girl of many schoolboys, now a mother of two.

Unsentimental to a fault, Siddharth Chowdhury’s stories deal with relationships that are intimate and sensuous and sometimes hard to define; taken together, they are an affectionate nod to an idealist generation, insulated in a world of publishing, academia, gin-soaked brunches and Marxist philosophy.

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About the Author

Born in Patna in 1974, Siddharth Chowdhury is the author, most recently of Day Scholar, shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize 2009. He works as an editorial consultant with the house of Manohar.

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