The City of Dreadful Night and Other Places
Kipling's sketches of Calcutta, written when he was a young journalist there, are less stories than reported pieces: the railway station at dawn, the police, the opium dens, the English poor who had come out to make their fortune and had not.
The tone is curious and often condescending, and the book is a useful corrective to the idea that Kipling only wrote about emperors and soldiers. He is interested in the machinery of the city: who cleans it, who polices it, who dies in it. Read it as journalism, because that is what it is.
Public-domain status
First published in 1891. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Rudyard Kipling died in 1936, so this work has been free to republish there since 2007.
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- Project Gutenberg, ebook no. 61834 — plain text, EPUB and Kindle, checked by us
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Keep reading
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- Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen, 1813
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- Jane Eyre — Charlotte Brontë, 1847
- Kolkata — the city behind the books
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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