At the beginning of 2022, I published The Blue Book: A Writer’s Journal. A joy to be read by people who had inspired me in my youth. This comment from Pritish Nandy: https://twitter.com/PritishNandy/status/1488780984061669377 It is sad that Bookforum is now gone. In the work I did in 2022, I wrote a piece on cricket… Read more »
Posts Tagged: Writing
Letter of Recommendation
I recommend the humble check mark. I’m here to reclaim the check mark in its basic form, etched by a human hand using ink or graphite.
BRICK Podcast
BRICK Magazine has just uploaded a podcast-interview with me where I answer the question: What can you write that will make anyone reading you give a dying man a drink of water? (And to read my original piece from BRICK 103, go here.
Notebooks
Over at Instagram, I’m engaged in a personal curatorial project: I’m looking at my old notebooks, some as much as twenty years old, and the clippings I have made about writers or about writing. I take a picture of the page and then erase what I think is less important. This is editorial work… Read more »
Love Poems
I have a new piece for The New Yorker’s Page-Turner: I am trying now to remember when it was that I stopped thinking of myself as a new immigrant. Please read the entire piece here.
Bad Writing
Here’s a piece that I published this morning about asking my students to do bad writing. Teju Cole makes a guest appearance. An invitation came by email to contribute to a teaching volume. A brief piece, only a few hundred words long, was needed. Describe a favorite teaching exercise from your literature classes. The word… Read more »
Writing About Cities
In my latest column for HT Brunch, a report on writing about cities: The Jaipur Literature Festival recently came to the US – to Boulder, Colorado, at the foothills of the tall Rockies. Partly as a result of the thin mountain air, and partly because of its wide skies and intense bright light, but maybe… Read more »
#TejuCole
My piece on the ways in which Teju Cole on social media sites makes writing and creativity take place in new ways: Everyone understands the idea of prompts. The use of #hashtags on Twitter, in my opinion, offers the most succinct example of incitement to writing. The novelist and photographer Teju Cole has used Twitter… 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