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.”
On Our Grief
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.
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.
Pub Day
Today is the official pub day Every Day I Write the Book. LitHub has published an extract from the book on writers and their rituals.
And here’s an interview with Joe Donahue at the NPR station WAMC.
Duke University Press is offering 50% off through May 1. Use the coupon code SPRING50. Go here to buy the book.
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 enter the code ‘Spring50.’ We are living in trying times. Start writing. Keep a journal. What you write today will become a part of history. Do not trust the State to be a keeper of your memory. Do not trust the media. In fact, you cannot even trust your memory. Write it down, write it down. And please, buy the book that Kirkus Reviews calls ‘an engaging, perceptive companion for all writers.’
My Daughter’s Letter
I’m proud of my daughter who has written a prize-winning essay about an embarrassing event:
Dear imagined future self,
On Halloween, my best friend’s older brother sold us each one Poland Spring water bottle filled with watered-down vodka. There are now 15 dollars less to my name. We drank this vodka with a great deal of teenage bravado — trying not wince at the clear liquid’s resemblance to rubbing alcohol. My friend’s father made a crudité platter for us. The night ended with me throwing up baby carrots and mini peppers in my dad’s Honda, at the first hard left out of my friend’s driveway. Never have I felt more like a 16-year-old.
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 N. Kalyan Raman.) Here is how the novel begins: “Once, in a village, there was a goat. No one knew where she was born. The birth of an ordinary creature never leaves a trace, does it?” When I read those lines, a thrill ran through me.
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 rely on storytelling, but that’s like saying soil is used both in gardens and in graves. The way language is used in each case is entirely different, if not opposed.
First Review: Every Day I Write the Book
Thank you, Kirkus Reviews!
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 his writings, so that the photograph of a young Berger looked out on the room. Berger, at once a writer and an artist and a critic, was important to me: I had discovered him as an undergraduate in Delhi. No one else could be as political and sensual as he was in his writing. His books have been my companions for much of my adult life; A Seventh Man, his imaginative work on migrants in Europe, inspired my very first book, Passport Photos. His language hovered between poetry and criticism; he was at once incisive and lyrical; a precursor to many contemporary writers who mix genres. On that same shelf with Berger’s books I put books by writers I knew personally and admired – Michael Ondaatje, Geoff Dyer and Teju Cole – but also Joan Didion. I had never met Didion or Berger, so neither could be aware of this, but I had turned them into my mentors. ‘The contents of someone’s bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait,’ the critic Anatole Broyard wrote. I was trying to create a family album, accurate for who I was as a writer at that time in my life.
More