"One of the few contemporary writers of whom we can speak in terms of greatness." -Mel Gussow,
Newsday "Miguel Street is the Bowery, the Tenderloin, and the Catfish Row of Trinidad's Port of Spain-its citizens a loony multitude whose knavery often rises from real kinship with pathos and tragedy. . . . Naipaul is at his best in these swift caricatures of human depravity." -
San Francisco Chronicle "Amusing and poignant. . . . Excellent reading." -
Chicago Tribune "Naipaul does not tell stories. By some miraculous sleight-of-hand he takes you to Port of Spain and shows you the rich, bawdy, consequential lives of the Trinidadians, as though there were no intervening veil of words. . . . I rather suspect the mantle of Chekhov has fallen on Mr. Naipaul's shoulders." -Robert Payne,
Saturday Review
V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He went to England on a scholarship in 1950. After four years at Oxford he began to write, and since then he has followed no other profession. He is the author of more than twenty books of fiction and nonfiction and the recipient of numerous honors, including the Nobel Prize in 2001, the Booker Prize in 1971, and a knighthood for services to literature in 1990. He lives in Wiltshire, England.