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 »
Posts Categorized: Writing
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 »
First Review: Every Day I Write the Book
Thank you, Kirkus Reviews!
The Family of Books
I have written a piece for Granta on bookshelves. When I moved into the house I bought a few years ago across the road from Vassar College library, the first thing I unpacked was my own little library. On one small shelf I put books by John Berger, putting in the center an anthology of… Read more »
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 »
I’m Writing a Novel, but There Is the News
In which I ask: What can you write that will make anyone reading you give a dying man a drink of water? More
MacDowell Residency, June-July 2019
Drawing in a Time of Fear & Lies
I’m so very excited to have published this piece—particularly my drawing—in the art magazine Hyperallergic.