A week has passed since the attack on Salman Rushdie. Today, I published a longer essay on Oprah Daily. Why use a still from The Far Pavilions here? Read on. In the opening paragraph of his memoir titled Joseph Anton, Salman Rushdie writes about first receiving the call from a BBC reporter asking for a response… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Criticism
Outlook Magazine
Read the interview here.
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
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 »
First Review: Every Day I Write the Book
Thank you, Kirkus Reviews!
New Interview
Jeffrey Williams (JW): Your new novel, Immigrant, Montana, has been widely reviewed and most of the reviews have touted it as autofiction, although it strikes me that it is not really autobiographical. Having known you for a long time, I’d say you conducted a skillful ruse, giving it the air of autobiography. Amitava Kumar… Read more »
He’s Gotta Have It
In the pages of the latest New Yorker, Joanna Biggs has a lovely, absorbing review of Immigrant, Montana. The new book falls between genres. Its aim is not to tell a story, exactly, but to create a portrait of a mind moving uneasily between a new, chosen culture and the one left behind. Kailash’s journey… Read more »
From Alice Munro to Zadie Smith
Thanks to Jane Ciabattari, I recommend five books on love for Book Marks over at Lithub.
Heat of Life
My brief piece for the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s Lingua Franca on Matthew Desmond’s Evicted. This book won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2017. In an author’s note, Desmond has written that often the very people he was studying taught him how to see. Nevertheless, he missed much, at least at first, “not… Read more »