A meditation on grief, These Errors are Correct is Jeet Thayil’s most intimate work to date. In poems of tenderness and rage, time blurs into a continuous present visited by Billy the Kid, the Buddha, Lata Mangeshkar, Jesus and Beethoven, by unnamed protagonists for whom faith and addiction are interchangeable, and by a remote god-like figure who will ‘lick / your wound with his infected tongue’.
A range of fixed and invented forms–rhymed syllabics, terza rima, ghazals, sonnets, the sestina, the canzone, stealth rhymes–make for a virtuosic, haunting collection. Originally published in 2008, the book has been out of print since 2010. With illustrations by the author, this new edition returns to the reader an essential and timeless book of poems. These Errors are Correct won the 2013 Sahitya Akademi Award.
PRAISE
‘Take a walk around Jeet Thayil’s brain-there’s gold and grief in the shadows, guarded by beautiful, strange creatures nobody else has seen.’ — Nicholson Baker
‘Jeet Thayil’s work is, quite simply, the genuine article. I shake, vigorously, his hand.’ — Thomas Lux
‘(O)ne of the most engaging voices you will read, full of wisdom and regret.’ — The Times
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeet Thayil was born into a Syrian Christian family in Kerala. As a boy he travelled through much of the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia with his father, TJS George, a writer and editor. He worked as a journalist for twenty-one years, in Bombay, Bangalore, Hong Kong and New York City. In 2005 he began to write fiction. The first instalment of his Bombay Trilogy, Narcopolis, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and became an unlikely bestseller. His book of poems These Errors Are Correct won the Sahitya Akademi Award (India’s National Academy of Letters), and his musical collaborations include the opera Babur in London. His essays, poetry and short fiction have appeared in the New York Review of Books, Granta, TLS, Esquire, The London Magazine, The Guardian and Alexander, among other venues. His most recent novel is Names of the Women. He is the editor of The Penguin Book of Indian Poets.
