What Ten Young Men Did [Hardcover]

Each of the ten princes has several adventures on his quest to be reunited with the crown-prince. Variegated violence and sorcery figure in their exploits, but love affairs are even more prominent. Commentators have lambasted Dandin's heroes for their antiheroic, apparently random, escapades, while in fact the architecture of his plot reveals an elegant, instructive construction.
What Ten Young Men Didis a coming-of-age novel from the seventh century CE. In combat and in the bedroom, ten individuals juggle virtue and vice on their heroic progress from adolescence to maturity. Dandin’s work is autobiographical in two senses: each of the young men narrates their personal experiences, while the author could not have written with such confident realism had he not had many of the same picaresque adventures in his native South India and beyond.
Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation
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The books line up on my shelf like bright Bodhisattvas ready to take tough questions or keep quiet company. They stake out a vast territory, with works from two millennia in multiple genres: aphorism, lyric, epic, theater, and romance. Published in the geek-chic format. #7220;The Clay Sanskrit Library represents one of the most admirable publishing projects now afoot. . . . Anyone who loves the look and feel and heft of books will delight in these elegant little volumes. Very few collections of Sanskrit deep enough for research are housed anywhere in North America. Now, twenty-five hundred years after the death of Shakyamuni Buddha, the ambitious Clay Sanskrit Library may remedy this state of affairs. No effort has been spared to make these little volumes as attractive as possible to readers: the paper is of high quality, the typesetting immaculate. The founders of the series are John and Jennifer Clay, and Sanskritists lÄ