ORDERS

Readings Orders 0

DEMANDS

Readings Demands 0

A Chance Meeting:american Encounters
[Paperback - 2024]
On Demand
Availability in 4-6 weeks on receipt of order
List Price: $19.95
Our Price: Rs.4895 Rs.4161
Standard Discount: 15%
You Save: Rs.734
Publisher: Nyrb Classics | ISBN: 9781681378107 | Pages: 416
Shipping Weight: .42 | Dimensions: 4.99 x 1.03 x 7.96 inches

Weaving a tapestry of creativity and circumstance, this lauded chronicle of the many links and serendipitous meetings between giants of American culture—from Henry James to Gertrude Stein to Zora Neale Hurston to Marcel Duchamp—now includes a new afterword by the author.

Rachel Cohen’s A Chance Meeting is a dazzling group portrait that offers a striking new vision of the making and remaking of the American mind and imagination from the Civil War to the Vietnam War. How does the happenstance of daily life become history? Cohen shows us, describing a series of, now boldly, now subtly, transformative encounters between a wide and surprising range of Americans. A young Henry James has his portrait taken by the photographer Mathew Brady—Brady, who will receive Walt Whitman in his studio and depict General Grant on the battlefield. Later, W.E.B. Du Bois and his professor William James visit Helen Keller; Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz argue about photography; and Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston write a play together. Throughout, Cohen’s narrative loops back and leaps forward with supreme agility, connecting, among others, Willa Cather, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Beauford Delaney, James Baldwin, and Richard Avedon. In A Chance Meeting, Rachel Cohen offers an abiding account of the continuing challenges and the astonishing achievements of American life.

Saadat Hasan Manto wrote more than twenty collections of short stories, five radio dramas, three essay collections, one novel, and a handful of film scripts. A Muslim living in Bombay at the time of the India-Pakistan Partition, Manto was forced to migrate with his family to Lahore, where he wrote his most wrenching Partition stories. When asked why he sought to humanize the grit of Bombay and the upheaval of Partition, Manto retorted, “If you cannot bear my stories, it is because we live in unbearable times.”
 
Born in Kashmir, journalist, author, and translator Khalid Hasan is best remembered for his translations of the poetry of Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Saadat Hasan Manto's short fiction.

Muhammad Umar Memon was a critic, short story writer, and translator. He edited The Annual of Urdu Studies at the University of Wisconsin.

Bestsellers in Bio & Autobiography

View All