“This is the Author” Interview for the Audio Version

Posted by & filed under Media.

<Writer’s voice> I did the audio version of my novel. Here’s a brief, four-minute interview for Penguin Random House Audio about the experience. Who would be my dream narrator? (I chose writers, not actors.) Which word from my novel was I unable to pronounce? (It was an adjective, describing a woman’s smile.) What did the whole exercise feel like? Please give it a listen if you like audio books.

To listen to an audio-clip from the novel, click on this link. Or click here to buy the audio version, which, of course, is the right thing to do.

He’s Gotta Have It

Posted by & filed under Criticism, Media.

In the pages of the latest New Yorker, Joanna Biggs has a lovely, absorbing review of Immigrant, Montana.

The new book falls between genres. Its aim is not to tell a story, exactly, but to create a portrait of a mind moving uneasily between a new, chosen culture and the one left behind. Kailash’s journey toward sexual integration in the West is cast (to quote the author’s note) as “a work of fiction as well as nonfiction, an in-between novel by an in-between writer,” complete with multiple epigraphs, pictures, footnotes academic and digressive, and both pop-cultural and literary-theoretical references.

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Notebooks

Posted by & filed under Writing.

 

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 but it is also a visual experiment: a presentation of photographic evidence of the thinking that went into the writing of Immigrant, Montana.

Confessions of a Beef-Eater

Posted by & filed under Media, Writing.

I have a piece in this week’s The Nation a special issue on food.

I’ll confess to the sin of beef eating in a moment. let me first confess to the sin of not having a true knowledge of science.

In May of this year, Justice Mahesh Chandra Sharma of the Rajasthan High Court suggested that the cow be adopted as the national animal of India. His rationale was that millions of gods and goddesses reside in the cow. And here’s the crucial science bit: According to the judge, the “cow is the only living being which intakes oxygen and emits oxygen.”

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