"This unique and captivating book takes the experiments of G.V. Desani as a starting point and composes a chronicle of living language enacted around the person of Mr S. Lyric and narrative, parodic and reflective, Vivek Narayanan gives us a work of "woof-confidence" rich with mini-disquisitions on desire, guilt, food, caste, malls, etc. Life and Times of Mr S is a brilliant homage to an ever-morphing language and land." - C.D. Wright "Life and Times of Mr S worked on me like magic. It unsettled my notion of what was real, what possible, and resettled that notion in a strange luminous place. Narayanan uses what he sees as singular illusions to conjure a "pluriverse" of his own, crowded with multiple, often polymorphous identities that, by their very nature, could be illusions too. This recalls the work (and play) of magician-acrobats and Narayanan is one of them. I"m dazzled by his dexterity." - Adil Jussawalla