I have just written a piece for Granta on a visit to my hometown. Ought one get a massage in Patna? How about a wedding? Or a funeral? These and other questions answered here. The day after the wedding, I flew out of Patna. When I returned to New York, I found copies of Granta… Read more »
Posts Tagged: Amitava Kumar
Lunch With A Bigot
Today I was sent the full cover of the new book.
First review is in
Kirkus Reviews calls Lunch with a Bigot “an exuberantly inquisitive collection of essays.” The photograph above is of Hanif Kureishi. I’ve put it up here because 1. he is looking good; 2. I have an essay on him in the forthcoming book; 3. I just wrote a review piece on his latest novel, The Last… Read more »
Granta
Granta 130 carries my essay, “Pyre,” a report on my mother’s death in Patna. A different version of this essay will appear in my forthcoming book, Lunch With a Bigot. This longer essay is titled “Missing Person.”
New Book
This book is forthcoming from Duke University Press, April 2015. Picador India will publish it in the summer of 2015. The cover-art is by Subodh Gupta: “Full Moon,” oil on canvas. My essays in the book, spanning fifteen years, are divided under four headings: Reading; Writing; Places; People. The book includes this brief piece: “Ten… Read more »
The PEN Ten Interview
Go here What is the responsibility of the writer? Our responsibility is only to be honest, even if it means being base or wrong. I fear it is fashionable for many writers to think that they have to be right. I want to be wrong but true. Our task is to be human. – Click… Read more »
On Akhil Sharma’s Art
My essay about Akhil Sharma’s writing, and his new novel Family Life, is now available on the Indian Quarterly website. Here’s an excerpt: I have read what I have written above and am struck immediately by the thought that Sharma himself would never approach his subject in the same way that I have. His writing… Read more »
Meeting the Minister
On the Indian Independence Day, a post went up about my meeting with Jitan Ram Manjhi, the Musahar Chief Minister of Bihar: Toward the end of May, I was driving on the Taconic highway and listening to a report from India on NPR. A reporter was at a bus-station in Gujarat, asking the youth selling… Read more »
Local Business
In the Paris Review, The Daily, my piece on Harry Roseman’s photographs of businesses in Hudson Valley: I first noticed Harry Roseman’s art while dropping off my shirts at the dry cleaner near my home. It is a photograph of the wall in the dry cleaner on which the photograph hangs. Roseman had taken the… Read more »
Bookslut Interview
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 »