The Middle Finger

Saikat Majumdar

• Publisher: S&S India
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9789392099281
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Women in Fiction
• Index: Literature

Never afraid of taking risks, SaikatMajumdar has taken his place as one the most striking novelists writing today. – SHASHI DESHPANDE In prose of spare elegance and understated precision, SaikatMajumdar explores an ethical conflict around mentorship, as well as a welter of questions around creative compromise, cultural privilege and entitlement, including the insidious pressures on poets to be'snarky and snappy'. Here is a storyteller whoselanguage is writerly yet beautifully unmannered, supple enough to combine irony with gentleness, finely-modulated observation with axiomatic ease. –ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIUM A novel of love and friendship, pleasure, pain and jealousy. –R. RAJ RAO What are the ethical boundariesof friendship and intimacy between a student and a teacher?Megha, ayoung writing lecturer in New Jersey struggles to finish her thesis and find full-time employment even as shebegins to find underground fame as a poet. Restless and disenchanted, she lets her professor and friends persuade her to take up a position at a new university in Delhi. Moving continents, resettling in the city she knew as a teenager, she discovers that the university is an island of wealth and privilege, and that her mandate is to teach and train some of the key members of India's ruling class. But her life as a teacher is disrupted as she makes a new friend who unsettles her and asks for unexpected support.In sharp and lyrical prose, The Middle Finger tells the story of a poet grappling with questions about mentorship and belonging, disrupting boundaries set by society and the hierarchies hidden in the world of education.