Mr. Sampath-The Printer of Malgudi, The Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma

“The novelist I most admire in the English language.” –Graham Greene“Few writers since Dickens can match the effect of colorful teeming that Narayan’s fictional city of Malgudi conveys.” –John Updike“The hardest of all things for a novelist to communicate is the extraordinary ordinariness of most human happiness…Jane Austen, Soseki, Chekhov: a few bring it off. Narayan is one of them.” –The Spectator“The experience of reading one of his novels is…comparable to one’s first reaction to the great Russian novels: the fresh realization of the common humanity of all peoples, underlain by a simultaneous sense of strangeness–like one’s own reflection seen in green twilight.” –New York Herald Tribune Book Review“Narayan is a writer of Gogol’s stature, with the same gift for creating a provincial atmosphere in a time of change…One is convincingly involved in this alien world without ever being aware of the technical devices Narayan so brilliantly employs.” –The New Yorker

R. K. Narayan (1906–2001), born and educated in India, was the author of fourteen novels, numerous short stories and essays, a memoir, and three retold myths. His work, championed by Graham Greene, who became a close friend, was often compared to that of Dickens, Chekhov, Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor, among others. October 10, 2006, is the centennial of Narayan’s birth.

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