Amit Chaudhuri + Simon Critchley

“He’d recently become aware that he existed; and he wanted to get to the bottom of the fathomless puzzle of this new, undeniable truth.” –Amit Chaudhuri, The Immortals
The protagonist in Amit Chaudhuri’s novel The Immortals has long hair, a guitar, and a copy of Sartre’s existentialist tract Being and Nothingness tucked under his arm. It is through music he seeks to explore the space between the material and the transcendental world. Here the novelist sits down with philosopher Simon Critchley and then the evening is concluded with a jam session bringing together the raga with jazz, rock, and the blues. Critchley’s new book How to Stop Living and Start Worrying (2010) appears in a paperback edition this November

Amit Chaudhuri is the author of several award-winning novels and is an internationally acclaimed musician and essayist.Freedom Song: Three Novels received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. He is a contributor to the London Review of Books, Granta, and The Times Literary Supplement. He is currently Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia.
Simon Critchley is Chair and Professor Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York City. His works include the acclaimed treatment on deconstruction, Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas, and Contemporary French Thought (1999); an interpretation of nihilism Very Little, Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (1997) and the bestselling The Book of Dead Philosophers (2008). He runs a column in The New York Times called ‘The Stone’. A collection of interviews with Critchley and Carl Cederström How to Stop Living and Start Worrying (2010) appears in a paperback edition this November. He is equally adept at discussing Ziggy Stardust and the soccer star Zidane, as he is Heidegger’s Being and Time.
“If you haven’t heard the band before, you’re in for a treat—dreamy raga-based discursions which incorporate the acid rock songbook, trumpeter Miles Davis’ modal legacy, Delta blues and retro Tin Pan Alley.”—All About Jazz.com

The musicians in the Amit Chaudhuri Band are able to be in New York thanks to the generosity of Dr Indu Pathak of the Metropolitan Hospital.