I feel as though I've gotten to a point where I don't really want to set a book in any real place ever again.
From Jhumpa Lahiri
Part of my whole project from the beginning was to make an absent world present for my parents, which was India.
I've always had this feeling wherever I go. Of not feeling fully part of things, not fully accepted, not fully inside of something.
Identity has been such an explosive territory for me... so hard, so painful at times.
My parents' relationship with Kolkata is so strong. Growing up, the absence of Kolkata was always present in our lives.
Language and identity are so fundamentally intertwined. You peel back all the layers in terms of what we wear and what we eat and all the things that mark us, and in the end, what we have are our words.
Many of the novelists I admire never left their hometown. Look at Flannery O'Connor. So many of the great Russians never left Russia. Shakespeare never left England. The list goes on.
I have very little choice. If I don't write, I feel dreadful. So I write.
I wish more Italian literature were translated and read in English. I've discovered so many extraordinary and diverse writers: Lalla Romano, Carlo Cassola. Beppe Fenoglio, Giorgio Manganelli, just to name a few.
The highlight of my undergraduate years was a year-long Shakespeare course I took with Edward Tayler.
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