About Salman Rushdie: Salman Rushdie is one of the world’s most acclaimed, award-winning contemporary authors. Translated into over forty languages, his sixteen works of fiction include Midnight’s Children – for which he won the Booker Prize in 1981, the Booker of Bookers on the 25th anniversary of the prize and Best of the Booker on the 40th anniversary – Shame, The Satanic Verses, Quichotte and Victory City. His latest book, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder was a number one Sunday Times bestseller. A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature and was made a Companion of Honour in the Queen's last Birthday Honours list in 2022.

Salman Rushdie

About Salman Khan: Salman Khan is the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, a nonprofit with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. His lessons on YouTube have revolutionized learning, garnering billions of views globally. Recognized as one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People in the World, Khan is also the founder of schoolhouse.world, Khan Lab School, and Khan World School, and the author of The One World Schoolhouse. He holds three degrees from MIT and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Salman Khan

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Ved Mehta

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Ved Mehta's brilliant Mahatma Gandhi and his Apostles provides an unparalleled portrait of the man who lead India out of its colonial past and into its modern form. Travelling all over India and the rest of the world, Mehta gives a nuanced and complex, yet vividly alive, portrait of Gandhi and of those men and women who were inspired by his actions.

Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles

Returning to 1960s' India after decades beyond its borders, Ved Mehta explores his native country with two sets of eyes: those of the man educated in the West, and those of the child raised under the Raj. Travelling from the Himalayas in the east to Kerala in the west, Ved Mehta's observations and insights into India and some of its most interesting figures - including Indira Gandhi, Jaya Prakash Narayan and Satyajit Ray - create one of the twentieth century's most thought-provoking travel memoirs.

Portrait of India

M. K. Gandhi

Gandhi's non-violent struggles against racism, violence, and colonialism in South Africa and India had brought him to such a level of notoriety, adulation that when asked to write an autobiography midway through his career, he took it as an opportunity to explain himself.  He feared the enthusiasm for his ideas tended to exceed a deeper understanding of his quest for truth rooted in devotion to God. His attempts to get closer to this divine power led him to seek purity through simple living, dietary practices, celibacy, and a life without violence. This is not a straightforward narrative biography, in The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Gandhi offers his life story as a reference for those who would follow in his footsteps.

An Autobiography

Valmiki

Warrior-prince Rama is about to be crowned Young King, when he hears the devastating news that his father, King of Ayodhya, has been tricked into banishing him to the forest. His devoted wife Sita insists on accompanying him in exile, but the evil ten-headed lord Ravana has fallen deeply in love with the beautiful princess and steals her away. Aided by Hanuman, mighty captain of the monkeys, Rama sets out across the world to find her and destroy Ravana in a deadly battle. Rama the Steadfast was composed in the oral tradition in about the fifth century BC and has been retold over the generations ever since. With its fantastical characters ranging from monsters to apes, a very human hero and its profound moral purpose, it is one of the greatest of all Indian tales.

Rama the Steadfast

An Early Form of the Ramayana

Book 1 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. 
 
On its surface, Daddyji serves as a lucid biographical portrait of Amolak Ram Mehta, an esteemed Indian public servant, written by his son. But as Ved Mehta's story unwinds, it becomes apparent that something else is being recreated - the intricacies and intimacies of a lost world, of pre-Partition Lahore.

Daddyji

Continents of Exile: 1

Shiva Naipaul

In the 1970s Shiva Naipaul travelled to Africa, visiting Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia for several months. Through his experiences, the places he visited and his various encounters, he aimed to discover what 'liberation', 'revolution' and 'socialism' meant to the ordinary people. His journey of discovery is brilliantly documented in this intimate, comic and controversial portrayal of a continent on the brink of change.

North of South

An African Journey

Book 3 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. 
 
Ved continues the story of Ved Mehta's two earlier memoirs, Daddyji, a biographical portrait of his father, and Mamaji, an exploration of his mother and her history. The focus here turns toward Mehta's childhood, his education in an Indian orphanage for the blind, and the general experience of blind people in India.

Vedi

Continents of Exile: 3

The last volume of Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. 
 
During the clamour of a New York dinner party, Mehta is startled to find his father crying on his mother's shoulders. This episode begins a painful and revealing voyage into his father's personal history. In stark prose, Mehta unravels a passionate, clandestine affair that bore quiet yet extraordinary consequences for himself and his family. Red Letters also serves as a brilliant exploration and a recreation of British India: its sights and sounds, its injustices and its secrecy.

The Red Letters

Continents of Exile: 12

J. R. Ackerley

A highly entertaining and moving journal chronicling J. R. Ackerley's time in India 
 
In the 1920s, the young J. R. Ackerley spent several months in India as the Private Secretary to the Maharajah of Chhokrapur. Knowing almost nothing of India, he discovers Hindu culture, festivals and language, and reveals the fascinating attitudes of the Palace staff on women, marriage. the caste system and death. At the heart of Hindoo Holiday is the wonderfully unpredictable figure of his Highness the Maharajah Sahib who, ultimately, just wants 'someone to love him'.

Hindoo Holiday

An Indian Journal

Book 10 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. 
 
In lucid, sparse prose Mehta documents the twists and turns of a romantic history peppered with disappointment and anguish - that is until, in his search for self-understanding, he meets a surprising guide who shows the way toward new insights about himself and those he has loved.

All for Love

Continents of Exile: 10

Book 4 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. 
 
Set against the distant storm of the Second World War and the waning light of British Raj, Ved Mehta's brilliant memoir Ledge Between the Streams tells of an Indian childhood and the coming to terms with growing blindness: how, despite his disability, he learned English, Braille, horseback riding, bicycling, touch typing, and roller skating.

Ledge Between the Streams

Continents of Exile: 4

Book 8 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. 
 
Veritas continues Mehta's journey through education: this time as a Ph.D. student and Residential Fellow at Harvard. His experience illustrates the dramatic changes in institutional habits and behaviour that were to take places in the late 1960s, as well as how dramatically out-of-touch many senior lecturers were to the societal mood around them.

Haunted by Harvard

Continents of Exile: 8

Book 2 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. 
 
After studying in the United States, Mehta - blind since childhood - achieves his dream of enrolling at the University of Oxford: a place that has consumed his imagination ever since he was a small boy growing up under the British Raj. In Up at Oxford, Mehta recalls the nuances of his conversations, the range of his youthful emotions, and the sounds, smells, and tastes of university life. Along the way he draws memorable portraits of, among others, novelists, poets, scholars, and peers.

Up at Oxford

Continents of Exile: 7

Book 2 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. 
 
Translating individual experience into the universal, Mehta recounts the story of his mother's arranged marriage to a British-trained doctor and, by extension, of an ancient Indian family's struggle to find its place in a modern, rapidly changing world.

Mamaji

Continents of Exile: 2

Rabindranath Tagore

Tagore was a fierce opponent of British rule in India. In this work he discusses the resurgence of the East and the challenge it poses to Western supremacy, calling for a future beyond nationalism, based instead on cooperation and racial tolerance. 
 
GREAT IDEAS. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

Nationalism

Book 5 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. 
 
In 1949, fifteen-year-old Ved Mehta -- blind since the age of four -- left his native India and travelled alone to a school for the blind in Arkansas, USA. For the next three years he studied with over a hundred blind or partially sighted children at the school. Here, he would learn how to deal with Western teachers, date girls, and begin to perceive objects by means of 'sound-shadows'. Sound-Shadows of the New World brilliantly traces the emigrant experience amid the difficult transition from adolescence into adulthood.

Sound-Shadows of the New World

Continents of Exile: 5

The Laws of Manu form a towering work of Hindu philosophy. Composed by many Brahmin priests, this is an extraordinary, encyclopaedic representation of human life in the world, and how it should be lived. Manu encompasses topics as wide-ranging as the social obligations and duties of the various castes, the proper way for a righteous king to rule and to punish transgressors, relations between men and women, birth, death, taxes, karma, rebirth and ritual practices. First translated into English in 1794, its influence spread from Nietzsche to the British Raj, and although often misinterpreted, it remains an essential work for understanding India today.

The Laws of Manu

Simhasana Dvatrimsika

The fabled monarch Vikramaditya is considered to be a model of kingly virtues, and his reign a golden age of peace and prosperity. Narrated by the thirty-two statuettes of nymphs supporting his magic throne, the Tales describe his exploits and extol his extraordinary courage, compassion and kindness. Against an exotic setting of adventures and miracles, they depict such fantastical elements as fights with ogres, occult rituals and travels to other world, as well as very human situations of betrayal and rivalry. Dating from the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, these colourful Tales are an intriguing mix of marvellous happenings, proverbial wisdom and sage precepts that entertain even as they instruct.

Thirty-two Tales of the Throne of Vikramaditya

Book 6 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. 
 
The Stolen Light engages with the particular difficulties of Mehta's experience: he was blind in a college made for the seeing, he was an Indian in the United States, a Hindu in a Christian environment, a dark-skinned man surrounded by white people. With compelling honesty and humour, Mehta describes his struggles to live an ordinary university life - dating, riding a bicycle, keeping up with his studies - while dealing with incredible obstacles.

The Stolen Light

Continents of Exile: 6

Quintus Curtius Rufus

Alexander the Great (356-323 BC), who led the Macedonian army to victory in Egypt, Syria, Persia and India, was perhaps the most successful conqueror the world has ever seen. Yet although no other individual has attracted so much speculation across the centuries, Alexander himself remains an enigma. Curtius' History offers a great deal of information unobtainable from other sources of the time. A compelling narrative of a turbulent era, the work recounts events on a heroic scale, detailing court intrigue, stirring speeches and brutal battles - among them, those of Macedonia's great war with Persia, which was to culminate in Alexander's final triumph over King Darius and the defeat of an ancient and mighty empire. It also provides by far the most plausible and haunting portrait of Alexander we possess: a brilliantly realized image of a man ruined by constant good fortune in his youth.

The History of Alexander

Book 11 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. 
 
This chapter of Mehta's remarkable memoirs details the many dilemmas he encounters during the building of a new home on a strange, irresistible island: from ever-climbing costs to a frequent infestations of potato bugs in the basement. Underlying the travails of construction lies a richly allegorical tale about Mehta's own struggles as a writer and as a man in love.

Dark Harbor

Continents of Exile: 11

Jack Kerouac

Never before published in Kerouac's lifetime, Jack Kerouac's Wake Up is a clear and powerful study of the life and works of Siddartha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism, from the author of On the Road. This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by Robert Thurman. 
 
Wake Up recounts the story of Prince Siddhartha's royal upbringing and his father's wish to protect him from all human suffering, despite a prediction that he would become a great holy man in later life. Departing from his father's palace, Siddhartha adopts a homeless life, struggles with his meditations, and eventually finds Enlightenment. Written at the end of Kerouac's career, when he became increasingly interested in Buddhist teachings, and collected for the first time in one book, this fresh and accessible biography is both an important addition to Kerouac's work and a valuable introduction to the world of Buddhism itself. 
 
Jack Kerouac (1922-69) was an American novelist, poet, artist and part of the Beat Generation. His first published novel, The Town and the City, appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, published in 1957, that made Kerouac famous. Publication of his many other books followed, among them The Subterraneans, Big Sur, and The Dharma Bums. Kerouac died in Florida at the age of forty-seven. 
 
If you enjoyed Wake Up, you might like Kerouac's The Dharma Bums, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 
 
'[Kerouac] defines the attitudes of an entire generation' 
Guardian

Wake Up

A Life of the Buddha

Gertrude Bell

The writings of one of the great woman adventurers of the twentieth century - the 'female Lawrence of Arabia' - and the subject of a new film starring Nicole Kidman. 
 
In the last century, few people lived more astounding - or influential - lives than Gertrude Bell. During World War I, she worked her way up from spy to army major to become one of the most powerful woman in the British Empire. After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, she was instrumental in drawing the borders that define the region today, including creating an independent Iraq. This is the epic story of Bell's life, told through her letters, military dispatches, diary entries, and other writings. It offers a unique and intimate look behind the public mask of a woman who shaped nations. 
 
Georgina Howell is the author of the acclaimed biography Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations.

A Woman in Arabia

The Writings of the Queen of the Desert

Fly and the Fly Bottle is perhaps Ved Mehta's masterpiece: a collection of his brilliantly revealing conversations with some of the twentieth century's most important philosophers. Engaging with such heavyweights as Isaiah Berlin, Gilbert Ryle, and Elizabeth Anscombe, Mehta is not only able to shed light on the personalities involved in shaping modern philosophy, as well as on the particularities of that philosophic thought, but also to minutely examine the surrounding atmosphere of mid-century British life.

Fly and the Fly-Bottle

Book 9 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. 
 
In Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker, Ved Mehta provides an unparalleled glimpse into the inner workings of the one of world's most famous magazines. He portrays in detail the strange, nurturing atmosphere at the New Yorker, and he recounts the earthquakes that shook the magazine as it moved into the hands of more commercial ownership. At once a tribute to William Shawn - one of the longest serving editors in the New Yorker's history - Mehta's memoir is also a joyful tribute to the intricately linked arts of editing, writing, and reading.

Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker

Continents of Exile: 9

R. K. Narayan

The Ramayana is, quite simply, the greatest of Indian epics - and one of the world's supreme masterpieces of storytelling 'Almost every individual living in India,' writes R. K. Narayan in the Introduction to this new interpretation, 'is aware of the story of The Ramayana. Everyone of whatever age, outlook, education or station in life knows the essential part of the epic and adores the main figures in it - Rama and Sita. Every child is told the story at bedtime . . . The Ramayana pervades our cultural life.' Although the Sanskrit original was composed by Valmiki, probably around the fourth century BC, poets have produced countless variant versions in different languages. Here, drawing his inspiration from the work of an eleventh-century Tamil poet called Kamban, Narayan has used the talents of a master novelist to recreate the excitement and joy he has found in the original. It can be enjoyed and appreciated, he suggests, for its psychological insight, its spiritual depth and its practical wisdom - or just as a thrilling tale of abduction, battle and courtship played out in a universe thronged with heroes, deities and demons.

The Ramayana

A Shortened Modern Prose Version Of The Indian Epic

Xenophon

One of Socrates' Athenian disciples in his youth, Xenophon (c. 498-354 bc) fought as a mercenary commander in Cyrus the Younger's campaign to seize the Persian throne, and later wrote a wide range of works on history, politics and philosophy. These six treatises offer his informed insights into the nature of leadership. In the dialogue between the poet Simonides and Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse, Xenophon provides a consummate consideration of the burdens of being an absolute dictator and the superior happiness of the private man. Elsewhere, his biography of King Agesilaus II of Sparta depicts the author's patron as a model of piety, justice, courage and wisdom, while other texts consider the essential qualities of the cavalry commander, analyse the skills of the horseman and the hunter, and advance a bold economic plan for democratic Athens.

Hiero the Tyrant and Other Treatises

The Bhagavad Gita is an early epic poem that recounts the conversation between Arjuna the warrior and his charioteer Krishna, the manifestation of God. In the moments before a great battle, the dialogue sets out the important lessons Arjuna must learn to change the outcome of the war he is to fight, and culminates in Krishna revealing to the warrior his true cosmic form, counselling him to search for the universal perfection of life. Ranging from instructions on yoga postures to dense moral discussion, the Gita is one of the most important Hindu texts, as well as serving as a practical guide to living well.

The Bhagavad Gita

Malcolm X

Alex Haley

From hustling, drug addiction and armed violence in America's black ghettos Malcolm X turned, in a dramatic prison conversion, to the puritanical fervour of the Black Muslims.  As their spokesman he became identified in the white press as a terrifying teacher of race hatred; but to his direct audience, the oppressed American blacks, he brought hope and self-respect.  This autobiography (written with Alex Haley) reveals his quick-witted integrity, usually obscured by batteries of frenzied headlines, and the fierce idealism which led him to reject both liberal hypocrisies and black racialism.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Visnu Sarma

First recorded 1500 years ago, but taking its origins from a far earlier oral tradition, the Pancatantra is ascribed by legend to the celebrated, half-mythical teacher Visnu Sarma. Asked by a great king to awaken the dulled intelligence of his three idle sons, the aging Sarma is said to have composed the great work as a series of entertaining and edifying fables narrated by a wide range of humans and animals, and together intended to provide the young princes with vital guidance for life. Since first leaving India before AD 570, the Pancatantra has been widely translated and has influenced a cast number of works in India, the Arab world and Europe, including the Arabian Nights, the Canterbury Tales and the Fables of La Fontaine. Enduring and profound, it is among the earliest and most popular of all books of fables.

The Pancatantra

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