This definitive collection of Ved Mehta’s work contains excerpts from nearly all his writings, many of which first appeared in the New Yorker. It begins with his first book, the classic autobiography highlighting his blindness, Face to Face, and features his iconic books about India and his family saga, Continents of Exile. Each entry comes with a reflection by Mehta. Authoritative and illuminating, the book is not just an introduction to this seminal author but also a passionate record of a writer looking back upon his own work.

Ved Mehta's brilliant Mahatma Gandhi and his Apostles provides an unparalleled portrait of the man who lead India out of its colonial past and into its modern form. Travelling all over India and the rest of the world, Mehta gives a nuanced and complex, yet vividly alive, portrait of Gandhi and of those men and women who were inspired by his actions.

Blind since the age of four, Ved Mehta led a lonely and turbulent childhood in India until he was accepted to the Arkansas School for the Blind, to which he flew alone at fifteen. America and the school changed his life, leading to degrees at Oxford and Harvard Universities and a fruitful writing career. Face to Face (1957), Mehta’s first book, is the author’s autobiography touching upon childhood, blindness and remaking himself. It remains one of his most beloved works.

Book 11 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. This chapter of Mehta's remarkable memoirs details the many dilemmas he encounters during the building of a new home on a strange, irresistible island: from ever-climbing costs to a frequent infestations of potato bugs in the basement. Underlying the travails of construction lies a richly allegorical tale about Mehta's own struggles as a writer and as a man in love.

Returning to 1960s' India after decades beyond its borders, Ved Mehta explores his native country with two sets of eyes: those of the man educated in the West, and those of the child raised under the Raj. Travelling from the Himalayas in the east to Kerala in the west, Ved Mehta's observations and insights into India and some of its most interesting figures - including Indira Gandhi, Jaya Prakash Narayan and Satyajit Ray - create one of the twentieth century's most thought-provoking travel memoirs.

For more than three decades, a quiet man—some would say almost an invisible man—dwelt at the center of American journalistic and literary life. He was William Shawn, the editor-in-chief of The New Yorker from 1952 to 1987. Through the writers and artists he gathered around him and worked with, the forms of writing he invented, the pieces he encouraged and published, and his gentle but meticulous editing of those pieces, he expanded—permanently—the range of the possible in journalistic and literary writing. Among his writers were Edmund Wilson, Rachel Carson, John Cheever, V. S. Pritchett, J. D. Salinger, Penelope Mortimer, A. J. Liebling, John Updike, Donald Barthelme, Jonathan Schell and Jamaica Kincaid. In Remembering Mr. Shawn’s New Yorker, a memoir that in itself is a literary achievement of a high order, Ved Mehta—who started writing for The New Yorker at the age of twenty-five, and over some thirty-three years contributed such historic pieces as his brilliant study of philosophers at Oxford and his biographical portrait of Mahatma Gandhi—gives us the closest and most refined description that has yet been written of Shawn’s editorship of the magazine. He portrays in detail the peculiar, nurturing atmosphere of The New Yorker. And he recounts the series of “tremors” that shook the magazine in the last years of Shawn’s editorship that ended in his abrupt, tragic dismissal by the new owners.

Fly and the Fly Bottle is perhaps Ved Mehta's masterpiece: a collection of his brilliantly revealing conversations with some of the twentieth century's most important philosophers. Engaging with such heavyweights as Isaiah Berlin, Gilbert Ryle, and Elizabeth Anscombe, Mehta is not only able to shed light on the personalities involved in shaping modern philosophy, as well as on the particularities of that philosophic thought, but also to minutely examine the surrounding atmosphere of mid-century British life.