Collected Short Fiction

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Adventures of Gurudeva, André Deutsch, 1976, a collection of stories by Naipaul’s father Seepersad, with a foreword by Naipaul, is indispensable reading for anyone interested in this writer’s work, besides possessing its own considerable interest. The books of his brother Shiva are also recommended. They include the novels Fireflies, André Deutsch, 1970, and The Chip-Chip Gatherers, André Deutsch, 1973.

V. S. Naipaul: A Critical Introduction, Macmillan, 1975, by Landeg White, is valuable for its sensitive readings of the earlier work by a critic inward with West Indian life. Another critic of West Indian background is Selwyn Cudjoe, whose V. S. Naipaul: A Materialist Reading, University of Massachusetts, 1988, has an appreciative discussion of Biswas; the later work is discussed from an adversarial standpoint. A similar approach, concerned mainly with Naipaul’s non-fiction, can be found in London Calling: V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin, Oxford University Press, 1992, by Rob Nixon. An earlier account is William Walsh’s V. S. Naipaul, Oliver and Boyd, 1973. John Thieme’s The Web of Tradition, Hansib Publishing, 1987, deals with ‘the uses of allusion’ in the fiction. A short study by Peter Hughes, V. S. Naipaul, Routledge, appeared in 1988. Naipaul’s books have attracted a large amount of periodical criticism: a selection of such material is presented in Critical Perspectives on V. S. Naipaul, Heinemann Educational, ed. Robert Hamner, 1979.