The Writer and the World: Essays - Softcover

Spanning some forty years of writing, a collection of essays by Nobel laureate offers many of his finest shorter pieces of reflection and journalism as he writes about the Muslim invasions of India, Mobuto's mad reign in Zaire, the New York mayoral elections, and other fascinating aspects of people, cultures, and places around the world. 25,000 first printing.

ars V. S. Naipaul has been traveling and, through his writing, creating one of the most wide-ranging and sustained meditations on our world. Now, for the first time, his finest shorter pieces of reflection and reportage ― nearly all of them heretofore out of print ― are collected in one volume.

With an abiding faith in the redemptive power of modernity balanced by a sense of wonder about the past, Naipaul has explored an astonishing variety of societies and peoples through the many-sided prism of his own experience. Whether writing about the Muslim invasions of India, Mobutu’s mad reign in Zaire, or the New York mayoral elections, he has demonstrated again and again that no one has a shrewder intuition of the ways in which power works, of the universal relation of the exploiter and the exploited. And no one has put forth a more consistently eloquent defense of the dignity of the individual and the value of civilization.

Infused with a deeply felt humanism, &