Finalist, Pulizer Prize Winner, Kariyama Prize Chosen as a “Book of the Year” for 2004 by The Economist

“The main book I read, the only book you need to read is Maximum City, the Suketu Mehta book. It's just a drop dead book. I read that all the time and half the time I thought I was adapting that, not Q&A, the book we were meant to be adapting.... I had it in my pocket the whole time.”

— Danny Boyle, the Oscar™-winning
director of “Slum Dog Millionaire”

Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
Winner, 2005 Kiriyama Prize
Pulitzer Prize Finalist, 2005
Shortlisted for the BBC4 Samuel Johnson Book Prize for Non-Fiction
Chosen as a Book of the Year for 2004 by The Economist

Director Danny Boyle, the Oscar™ winning director of “Slumdog Millionaire,” credited Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found “as his bible and referred to it all through filming for inspiration, comprehension and balance.” He is now making a movie of Maximum City, and the Slumdog screenwriter has been assigned to the project.

Author Suketu Mehta’s book paints a brilliantly illuminating portrait of Bombay, the largest city in the world, and its people - as vast, diverse, and rich in experience, incident, and sensation as the city itself.

A native of Bombay (now known as Mumbai), Mehta gives us a true insider's view of this stunning city, bringing to his account a rare level of insight, detail, and intimacy. He approaches the city from unexpected angles-taking us into the criminal underworld of rival Muslim and Hindu gangs who wrest control of the city's byzantine political and commercial systems; following the life of a bar dancer who chose the only life available to her after a childhood of poverty and abuse; opening the doors onto the fantastic, hierarchical inner sanctums of Bollywood; delving into the stories of the countless people who come from the villages in search of a better life and end up living on the sidewalks-the essential saga of a great city endlessly played out.

As each individual story unfolds we hear the mixture of love, frustration, fascination, and intense identification Suketu Mehta feels for and with Bombay, as he tries to find home again after twenty-one years abroad. And he makes clear that Bombay is a harbinger of the vast megalopolises that will redefine the very idea of "the city" in the near future.

Bollywood Confidential: Inside the World's Most Popular Art Form.

Every year a billion more people watch Bollywood films than those from Hollywood. Bollywood, the world's largest film industry, is increasingly capturing hearts and minds in theaters all across America, as it has been doing in the rest of the world. What it is about these films that make them the most popular art form on the planet in places as diverse as Peru and Uzbekistan? Mehta takes you into the making of Bollywood which is often more interesting than the films themselves. He reveals the rigor and compromise involved in making popular art which has to appeal to a billion people.

Suketu Mehta worked for several years in the scripting and production of top Bollywood films such as Mission Kashmir. Mehta takes you behind the scenes of these fabulous entertainments and explains their global appeal. He has also written feature articles on Bollywood for National Geographic, The New York Times Magazine, Conde Nast Traveler, and the Boston Globe. Mehta is currently writing the screenplay for the Merchant-Ivory film 'The Goddess', which will star Tina Turner.

American Immigration Today: Stories from the Melting Pot

What does it take for someone to come to America today? One of the central questions facing the United States today is how to manage its borders and how to accommodate migrants. Immigration is the one political issue on which you will find unlikely alliances between African Americans and White Supremacists, between labor unions and people in the top income brackets. The President is more pro-immigration than most of his party, and half of the Democrats. And yet American still leads the way in accommodating, and even celebrating, difference. Suketu Mehta, who immigrated to Queens from Bombay at the age of 14, explores the highly charged issue of immigration. Telling human stories about people braving great odds to get their shot at the American Dream. Mehta has written about the melting pot for such publications as The New York Times Magazine, and is writing a book about how immigrants are shaping the new New York.

Suketu Mehta is the New York-based author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, which won the Kiriyama Prize and the Hutch Crossword Award, and was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, the Lettre Ulysses Prize, the BBC4 Samuel Johnson Prize, and the Guardian First Book Award. He has won the Whiting Writers Award, the O. Henry Prize, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for his fiction. Mehta's work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Granta, Harpers Magazine, Time, and Condé Nast Traveler, and has been featured on NPR's 'Fresh Air'.

Mehta is Associate Professor of Journalism at New York University. He is currently working on a nonfiction book about immigrants in contemporary New York, for which he was awarded a 2007 Guggenheim fellowship. He has also written an original screenplay for 'The Goddess,' a Merchant-Ivory film starring Tina Turner, and 'Mission Kashmir', a Bollywood movie.

He was born in Calcutta and raised in Bombay and New York. He is a graduate of New York University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Visit:
www.suketumehta.com

“Bombay native Mehta fills his kaleidoscopic portrait of "the biggest, fastest, richest city in India" with captivating moments of danger and dismay. His sophisticated voice conveys postmodern Bombay with a carefully calibrated balance of wit and outrage, harking back to such great Victorian urban chroniclers as Dickens and Mayhew while introducing the reader to much that is truly new and strange.”

--Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

"Maximum City is narrative reporting at its finest, probably the best work of nonfiction to come out of India in recent years.."

-- The New York Times

“Mehta writes with a Victorian novelist’s genius for character, detail, and incident, but his voice is utterly modern....One of the most intimate and moving portraits of a place I have read.”

--Jhumpa Lahiri, author of The Namesake and Interpreter of Maladies

“Extraordinary....The quality of Mehta’s investigative reportage, the skill with which he persuades hoodlums and murderers to open up to him, is quite amazing. It’s the best book yet written about that great ruined metropolis, my city as well as his, and it deserves to be very widely read.”

--Salman Rushdie, author of Midnight’s Children