Posts By: Amitava Kumar
McNally Jackson Zoom Event
Every Day I Write the Book Register for this free McNally Jackson event on Zoom. A conversation on writing between Amitava Kumar and Hua Hsu, Thursday, May 21, 7 PM EST. From the McNally Jackson website: Topic Amitava Kumar (Every Day I Write the Book) In Conversation with Hua Hsu Description Amitava Kumar’s Every Day I… Read more »
On Our Grief
In the Indian Express, my article on our current grief. “The contagion has produced a new world, no doubt, but everything appears to be only a repetition of all that was there before.” More
BRICK Podcast
BRICK Magazine has just uploaded a podcast-interview with me where I answer the question: What can you write that will make anyone reading you give a dying man a drink of water? (And to read my original piece from BRICK 103, go here.
Postcards from the Pandemic
Virginia Quarterly Review has uploaded three of my #coronavirusdiary entries and three drawings as a part of their #VQRTrueStory series described as a “social-media experiment in nonfiction.” Go here for the first, here for the second, and here for the third.
Pub Day
Today is the official pub day Every Day I Write the Book. LitHub has published an extract from the book on writers and their rituals. And here’s an interview with Joe Donahue at the NPR station WAMC. Duke University Press is offering 50% off through May 1. Use the coupon code SPRING50. Go here to… Read more »
In Case of Emergency
I had scarcely imagined a pandemic looming in the future when I designed this sign for Every Day I Write the Book. This book, a product of many years of labor, is out this month. It is being offered for a truly remarkable fifty percent discount at the Duke University Press site. Go here and… Read more »
My Daughter’s Letter
I’m proud of my daughter who has written a prize-winning essay about an embarrassing event: Dear imagined future self, On Halloween, my best friend’s older brother sold us each one Poland Spring water bottle filled with watered-down vodka. There are now 15 dollars less to my name. We drank this vodka with a great deal… Read more »
The Story of a Goat
From my new piece about Perumal Murugan for the New Yorker’s Page-Turner: Earlier this year, at a literary festival in Jaipur, I met the Tamil writer Perumal Murugan. I had just finished reading his book “Poonachi,” which will be published in the U.S. this month as “The Story of a Goat.” (The translation is by… Read more »
Fiction vs. Fake News
From my new piece in the Columbia Journalism Review: A specter is haunting the writing of fiction—the specter of fake news. I fear that my abilities as a novelist are being challenged by those who manufacture lies on social media. There is fiction and then there is fiction—falsities that lead to lynchings and riots. Both… Read more »