About this item
The nonfiction debut from the author of the international bestseller Sacred Games about the surprising overlap between writing and computer codingVikram Chandra has been a computer programmer for almost as long as he has been a novelist In this extraordinary new book his first work of nonfiction he searches for the connections between the worlds of art and technology Coders are obsessed with elegance and style just as writers are but do the words mean the same thing to both Can we ascribe beauty to the craft of writing code Exploring such varied topics as logic gates and literary modernism the machismo of tech geeks the omnipresence of an Indian Mafia in Silicon Valley and the writings of the eleventh-century Kashmiri thinker Abhinavagupta Geek Sublime is both an idiosyncratic history of coding and a fascinating meditation on the writers art Part literary essay part technology story and part memoir it is an engrossing original and heady book of sweeping ideas.
About the Author
Vikram Chandra was born in New Delhi. He completed most of his secondary education at Mayo College, a boarding school in Ajmer, Rajasthan. After a short stay at St. Xavier's College in Mumbai, Vikram came to the United States as an undergraduate student. In 1984, he graduated from Pomona College (in Claremont, near Los Angeles) with a magna cum laude BA in English, with a concentration in creative writing. He then attended the Film School at Columbia University in New York. In the Columbia library, by chance, he happened upon the autobiography of Colonel James "Sikander" Skinner, a legendary nineteenth century soldier, born of an Indian mother and a British father. This book was to become the inspiration for Vikram's novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain. He left film school halfway to begin work on the novel. Red Earth and Pouring Rain was written over several years at the writing programs at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Houston. Vikram worked with John Barth at Johns Hopkins and with Donald Barthelme at the University of Houston; he obtained an MA at Johns Hopkins and an MFA at the University of Houston. While writing Red Earth and Pouring Rain, Vikram taught literature and writing, and also worked independently as a computer programmer and software and hardware consultant. His clients included oil companies, non-profit organizations, and the Houston Zoo. Red Earth and Pouring Rain was published in 1995 by Penguin/India in India; by Faber and Faber in the UK; and by Little, Brown in the United States. The book was received with outstanding critical acclaim. It won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book and the David Higham Prize for Fiction. A collection of short stories, Love and Longing in Bombay, was published in 1997 by Penguin/India in India; by Faber and Faber in the UK; and by Little, Brown in the United States. Love and Longing in Bombay won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book (Eurasia region) ; was short-listed for the Guardian Fiction Prize; and was included in "Notable Books of 1997" by the New York Times Book Review, in "Best Books of the Year" by the Independent (London) , in "Best Books of the Year" by the Guardian (London) , and in "The Ten Best Books of 1997" by Outlook magazine (New Delhi) . Two of these stories have been formerly published in the Paris Review and The New Yorker. The story "Dharma" was awarded the Discovery Prize by the Paris Review, and was included in Year's Best Fantasy and Horror (St. Martin's Press, 1998) .A novel, Sacred Games, was published in 2006 by Penguin/India in India; and by Faber and Faber in the UK. It will be published in January 2007 in the United States by HarperCollins.In June 1997, Vikram was featured in the New Yorker photograph of "India's leading novelists." His work has been translated into eleven languages.He has co-written Mission Kashmir, an Indian fe
