Through close analyses of specific objects of art and design, Brown describes how Indian artists engaged with questions of authenticity, iconicity, narrative, urbanization, and science and technology. She explains how the filmmaker Satyajit Ray presented the rural Indian village as a socially complex space rather than as the idealized site of “authentic India” in his acclaimed Apu Trilogy, how the painter Bhupen Khakhar reworked Indian folk idioms and borrowed iconic images from calendar prints in his paintings of urban dwellers, and how Indian architects developed a revivalist style of bold architectural gestures anchored in India’s past as they planned the Ashok Hotel and the Vigyan Bhavan Conference Center, both in New Delhi. Discussing these and other works of art and design, Brown chronicles the mid-twentieth-century trajectory of India’s modern visual culture.

Through close analyses of specific objects of art and design, Brown describes how Indian artists engaged with questions of authenticity, iconicity, narrative, urbanization, and science and technology. She explains how the filmmaker Satyajit Ray presented the rural Indian village as a socially complex space rather than as the idealized site of “authentic India” in his acclaimed Apu Trilogy, how the painter Bhupen Khakhar reworked Indian folk idioms and borrowed iconic images from calendar prints in his paintings of urban dwellers, and how Indian architects developed a revivalist style of bold architectural gestures anchored in India's past as they planned the Ashok Hotel and the Vigyan Bhavan Conference Center, both in New Delhi. Discussing these and other works of art and design, Brown chronicles the mid-twentieth-century trajectory of India's modern visual culture.

Long out of print, Rebecca Brown's brilliant debut novel explores the psychic repercussions of growing up in an alcoholic family, and the ways in which one woman's past continues to inform and inhabit her life. Robin Daley's childhood is dominated by a sense of impermanence: Her hard-drinking father disappears as suddenly and unexpectedly as he arrives. Her adulthood offers an escape, but strange things happen when the dark corners and locked rooms of family life are revealed.

Rebecca Brown is the author of The Gifts of the Body, The Last Time I Saw You, and The End of Youth. She lives in Seattle.

In The Last Time I Saw You, author Rebecca Brown returns to the obsessive, darkly humorous voice that has earned her comparisons to Samuel Beckett and Djuna Barnes. Some of the tales in this collection are told in the scrappy, breathless voice of a naïf on the verge of a terrible revelation. Others are noir-baroque monologues that collapse in on themselves as a speaker at last abandons a much-needed delusion. Intense, artfully crafted, and oddly comic, the stories in this collection are bound to stay with you like an insistent, disturbing dream.

Rebecca Brown is the winner of the 2003 Washington State Book Award. Her books include The Gifts of the Body, Excerpts From a Family Medical Dictionary, The Terrible Girls, and The End of Youth.