Daisy Rockwell interviewed me this month for Bookslut (I also love her illustration for the piece): You discuss a Hindi short story in your book, in which the three kilometers the young heroine must walk to college each day is described in three phases, and represents a kind of microcosm of the trials and tribulations… Read more »
Posts Tagged: A Matter of Rats
Rats in the New York Times
“A Matter of Rats” calls itself “a short biography of Patna,” the capital city of Bihar, but like Kumar’s other books, it is many (perhaps too many) things at once. A memoiristic essay that strives to reconcile his feelings for his hometown — despair on the one hand and concern on the other, for… Read more »
The Daily Worker’s Chappals
Culture Strike has published a brief adaptation of a section from A Matter of Rats: A couple of days before Independence Day this year, en route to Patna, I met Aman Sethi for dinner at a Delhi restaurant. Sethi is the author of A Free Man, a wonderful account of Ashraf, a daily-wage laborer from… Read more »
Rats in the New York Times Magazine
I’m delighted with this write-up by the wonderful Maud Newton in the NYT Magazine this weekend. Here is the link to the piece.
Chronogram Profile
A piece on A Matter of Rats in the Hudson Valley magazine, Chronogram: A Matter of Rats was inspired by E. B. White’s 1949 essay Here Is New York, for which White traveled to Manhattan during a heat wave, staying at the Algonquin Hotel and going on daily foraging trips. Kumar followed his lead, visiting… Read more »
The Place of Place
Download the “Introduction” to A Matter of Rats, entitled “The Place of Place” and written specially for the US edition, here on Scribd. Each book, like a place on a map joined by roads and rivers to other places, is connected to other books. That is certainly true about this books about my hometown, Patna…. Read more »
Choosing My Epitaph
When the Indian edition of A Matter of Rats came out, I was asked during one of my interviews about the epitaph I would choose for myself: Q: What would you like your epitaph to read? AK: He failed often, but look – no one fails all the time. More