On the anniversary of the lynching of Mohammad Akhlaq in Dadri, I wrote a brief prose-poem which was published by The Wire: A lot of life is left in a man being killed. He does not at first foresee the end. He knows, of course, that anything can happen. When it begins his only worry… Read more »
Posts Tagged: Amitava Kumar
In Patna
I have returned to my hometown to read from The Lovers as a part of a #BiharKalam event.
Heat of Life
My brief piece for the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s Lingua Franca on Matthew Desmond’s Evicted. This book won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2017. In an author’s note, Desmond has written that often the very people he was studying taught him how to see. Nevertheless, he missed much, at least at first, “not… Read more »
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
My review of Arundhati Roy’s novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness in Bookforum: On the morning of June 9, 2012, Avtar Singh called 911 in Selma, California, to say that he had killed his family and was about to turn the gun on himself. When the police reached his house, they sent in a… Read more »
Santosh Yadav Must Be Released #PressFreedom
The excellent Indian magazine, Caravan, has published a report I wrote on the repression of journalists in Bastar: “Yeh raat mein sapna dekh raha tha sarkar ke khilaaf,” Kamal Shukla, a veteran reporter said. I was travelling with him for a few days in Bastar, in December, and Shukla was describing the dire conditions journalists… Read more »
The Lovers: A Novel
Forthcoming/Monsoon, 2017/Indian subcontinent only/Aleph Book Company. The book will also be published under the title Immigrant, Montana: A Novel by Faber in the UK, Knopf in the US, and in translation by publishers elsewhere.
Mohsin Hamid’s _Exit West_
The review I wrote of Mohsin Hamid’s latest novel, Exit West, appears in the new Bookforum (Feb/Mar, 2017). My thanks to the model in the top picture–he was home the day the magazine arrived because school had been cancelled due to snow.
Trumpistan
Post-election, my thoughts from a writer’s notebook in The Margins: Early on November 8, I cast my vote for Hillary Clinton at my son’s school. The school was closed for the day and my children were at home. Then the wait began. That evening, the writer Chang-rae Lee was doing a reading on my… Read more »
Thank You, United States Artists
These are hard times and they call for hard work, not least from writers and artists. I’m thrilled to report that have I just been awarded a literature fellowship from USArtists. This year’s other literature honoree is the truly magnificent Claudia Rankine. Look at the list of past winners in the photo above–the complete… Read more »
Pyre
I’m thrilled to report that my essay “Pyre,” published in Granta 130, will appear in Best American Essays 2016, edited by Jonathan Franzen. My mother died in Patna on 7 January 2014. We cremated her two days later on the banks of the Ganga at Konhara Ghat near Patna, more than 150 miles downriver from… Read more »