The Quartet of Causeries

508 pages

August, 2009

ISBN: 9780814719787

$25

Cloth

Add to Cart

Request Exam or Desk Copy

Subjects:

Literature

Part of the Clay Sanskrit Library series

Authors


All books by Shudraka, Shyamilaka, Vara-ruchi, and Ishvara datta

All books by Csaba Dezsö

All books by Somadeva Vasudeva

The Quartet of Causeries have been handed down as a collection of the most ancient monologue farces in classical Sanskrit. Though stylistically divergent, they share a common plot: the hero is an inept, bungling procurer, who mismanages his client's love-affairs to an unexpectedly successful completion. A wide spectrum of India's urban society is scandalized, from respected judges to clumsy poetasters, from hypocritical Buddhist monks to greedy madams, from spoiled scions of wealthy houses to criminal low-life.

Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation

For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org

Reviews

  • "The books line up on my shelf like bright Bodhisattvas ready to take tough questions or keep quiet company. They stake out a vast territory, with works from two millennia in multiple genres: aphorism, lyric, epic, theater, and romance."

    —Willis G. Regier, The Chronicle Review

  • "No effort has been spared to make these little volumes as attractive as possible to readers: the paper is of high quality, the typesetting immaculate. The founders of the series are John and Jennifer Clay, and Sanskritists can only thank them for an initiative intended to make the classics of an ancient Indian language accessible to a modern international audience."

    —The Times Higher Education Supplement

  • "The Clay Sanskrit Library represents one of the most admirable publishing projects now afoot. . . . Anyone who loves the look and feel and heft of books will delight in these elegant little volumes."

    —New Criterion

  • "Published in the geek-chic format.”

    —BookForum

  • "Very few collections of Sanskrit deep enough for research are housed anywhere in North America. Now, twenty-five hundred years after the death of Shakyamuni Buddha, the ambitious Clay Sanskrit Library may remedy this state of affairs."

    —Tricycle