Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul brings his signature gifts of observation, his ferocious impatience with received truths, and his masterfully condensed prose to these eleven essays on reading, writing, and identitywhich have been brought together for the first time. Here the subject is Naipaul's literary evolution: the books that delighted him as a child; the books he wrote as a young man; the omnipresent predicament of trying to master an essentially metropolitan, imperial art form as an Asian colonial from a New World plantation island. He assesses Joseph Conrad, the writer most frequently cited as his forebear, and, in his celebrated Nobel Lecture, "Two Worlds," traces the full arc of his own career.Literary Occasionsis an indispensable addition to the Naipaul oeuvre, penetrating, elegant, and affecting.

V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He went to England on a scholarship in 1950. After four years at University College, Oxford, he began to write, and since then has followed no other profession. He has published more than twenty books of fiction and nonfiction, including <b>Half a Life</b><i>, </i><b>A House for Mr. Biswas</b><i>, </i><b>A Bend in the River</b><i>, </i>and a collection of letters, <b>Between Father and Son</b><i>.</i> In 2001 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.<br><br><br><i>From the Hardcover edition.</i>