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 »
Posts Tagged: Amitava Kumar
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
Postcards from the Pandemic
Virginia Quarterly Review has uploaded three of my #coronavirusdiary entries and three drawings as a part of their #VQRTrueStory series described as a “social-media experiment in nonfiction.” Go here for the first, here for the second, and here for the third.
In Case of Emergency
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 »
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 »
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 »
In Support of Ilhan Omar
At the request of PEN America, I contributed a few lines to the Guardian in support of Rep. Ilhan Omar. Others writers did too. Go here.
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