Amitava Kumar

1 month ago | amitavakumar.substack.com | Amitava Kumar

Last week in my postcolonial lit. class, I once again taught Noor Naga’s novel If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English. This was my second time teaching it. When I taught it last, I had also chosen it among my favorite books of 2022.

2 months ago | amitavakumar.substack.com | Amitava Kumar

A year ago Yiyun Li lost James, her second child, to suicide. Earlier, in 2017, Yiyun’s elder child, Vincent, had also killed himself. In the weeks that followed James’s death, Yiyun would sometimes post on Instagram pictures of flowers in her garden and her captions simply read “Things in nature merely grow.” She has now written a book for James and given it that same perfect title. I finished reading an advance copy of the book today.

2 months ago | amitavakumar.substack.com | Amitava Kumar

Celia Paul’s recent self-portrait titled “Reclining Painter” (From the New Yorker) The Feb 3 issue of the New Yorker magazine has a profile piece about the painter Celia Paul by Karl Ove Knausgaard. I like reading prose about art, especially prose written by novelists, whether they be very old and gone, or just old and cherished but somewhat recently gone, or the very much alive and dancing till late into the night. Knausgaard, not a friend, didn’t disappoint.

2 months ago | indianexpress.com | Amitava Kumar

My cousin’s house overlooks a broad nala or open sewer here in my hometown Patna. My cousin died a few years ago; he was a doctor and his wife, my bhabhi, is also a doctor. When I visited my bhabhi last night, parking my car perilously close to the dark nala, our conversation turned very quickly to the fact that bhabhi’s daughter is bringing up an autistic son.

2 months ago | amitavakumar.substack.com | Amitava Kumar

Let’s call the student R. The principal of the school I was visiting said to others in the room soon after I arrived in her office, “Where is R.? Oh, he has a story to tell you.” A smiling, bespectacled teenager entered the room. He told me his name and then began with a bold declaration: “I exist because of you.”Turned out his father is Indian and Hindu; and his mother is a Pakistani Muslim. When she was being courted, R.’s mother read my book Husband of a Fanatic.