Posts Categorized: Writing

#IndiaAt75

PEN asked Indian writers to share thoughts on India’s 75th Independence Day. Here is my contribution. Go here to read the words of so many writers I admire: Kiran Desai, Suketu Mehta, Geetanjali Shree, Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Amit Chaudhuri, Jeet Thayil, and many, many others. These are sobering reflections on the idea of freedom—we… Read more »

An Open Letter to Hadi Matar

My open letter to Salman Rushdie’s would-be assassin in The Indian Express. Link here. An Open Letter to Hadi Matar   Sub-heading: On Friday, a 24-year-old from New Jersey named Hadi Matar attacked the writer Salman Rushdie with a knife. Another writer wants the would-be assassin to know more about the man he tried to… Read more »

Caleb Stein

I have a brief opinion piece in the New York Times about Caleb Stein’s astonishing photographs. POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y. — When I accepted a job to teach literature and writing at Vassar College in the summer of 2005, a colleague told me that Poughkeepsie — lesser known to some as the Queen City of the Hudson… Read more »

Writer’s Notebook

In the manuscripts and archives section of the British library, I found Shiva Naipaul’s notebook that he kept during his visit to India to report on the assassination of Indira Gandhi. My piece about that notebook has been published in the Hindustan Times. Read it here.

The Blue Book: Out this month!

From HarperCollins India “To mull over a beautiful line while looking upon a beautiful painting is the sublime pleasure offered by Amitava Kumar’s The Blue Book. This painted diary is a collage of the personal and the political, of terrifying news, the fleeting seasons, everyday pleasures, precious conversations, families and friendships—and on every page, the… Read more »

Amitava Kumar on Maris Review

Listen to Episode 129 on the Maris Review On writing fiction while surrounded by fake news: Amitava Kumar: The idea of how the world comes into your mundane life, how to find an imprint of that on the page, I think that’s what novels are doing these days. My novel is an investigation into that… Read more »

Tour Card

Click here to register for the 10/5 event with Teju Cole at the Community Bookstore Click here to register for the 10/6 event with Lydia Millet at the Elliott Bay Company Click here to register for the 10/7 event with David Means at Oblong Books Click here to register for the 10/12 event with Jenny… Read more »

#TolstoyTogether

Last year in March, the pandemic weighing heavy over us, the writer Yiyun Li made a generous proposal: we could read 15 or so pages of Tolstoy’s War and Peace every day as a part of an online community #TolstoyTogether. Yiyun said, “I have found that the more uncertain life is, the more solidity and… Read more »