Authenticity does matter, but only as it serves the novel's more traditional literary demands: that the fault lines be drawn where the… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
Everything in American public life, when it comes to race relations, serves as a frame for a history of violence and degrading… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
I'm generalizing wildly, but academic books find safety in explanations that reduce the chaos of social life. — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
In 1997, Alain de Botton published his book 'How Proust Can Change Your Life.' I was charmed by it. I remember using… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
I haven't reported in grand detail on rituals of American life, road journeys or malls or the death of steel-manufacturing towns. I… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
I thought I'd be the first to introduce herbal tea to Patna. White tea, ginger tea, rooibos, camomile. No one touched it. On subsequent… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
We live in a cynical system where the powerful are able to exploit the demand of the aggressive few, from whichever religion or group,… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
For some members of the radical Left, particularly in the West, people in developing countries are an ideological abstraction, on whom fantasies of liberation… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
The writer will write in his or her words, but the readers, even when they are not reading you, will take it elsewhere entirely. — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
My past makes me an insider, but my profession makes me an outsider. A writer always stands outside to report on reality. — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
We learn that our lives find narrative form neither in the tired, familiar slogans of our captains nor in the symmetries of ideological camps,… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
All good works of art must ask this question: 'You want to breathe free, yes, but do you know how to kiss?' — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
An essay is not an op-ed that tells its reader what to think. An essay is a complicated working-out of one's own contradictions and… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
Does the entry of Indian H-1B worker augur a change in the relations of production in the world of cybertechnology? No, but the presence… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
Michael Ondaatje’s work taught me how to be at home in fragments, and how to think about a big story in carefully curated vignettes.… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
