Tag: hari kunzru (last 300)
Flying while O1
(Guardian) Kunzru: airline moved his seat and denied it. Was it profiling? It turned flying into a surreal experience out of Nabokov novel. (via @amitavakumar)
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(Newstatesman) New Kunzru short story: While he was around to throw up in his friends’ kitchens and steal their ideas and make messy passes at their wives, he was tolerated, no more.
Kunzru on less-than-famous Nobel winner
(Millions) Kunzru: Most satirists sacrifice realism. Jelinek is cruel. I don’t want to live in her world, but suspect that in fact I do. (via @litblog)
Mindless, the gap
(Harikunzru Satire) London Tube sign telling Hari Kunzru not to run if he ‘looks a bit foreign.’ (via @amitavakumar, thanks Joolz)
Moondog transmission
Kunzru whoops it up
Rivers of kitsch
(Guardian) Kunzru: the BNP’s ‘Billy Brit’ is a pale cream sub-Sesame Street puppet name-checking white nationalist heroes in a castrato voice. Sadly, there’s now a huge white nationalist Tolkien fanbase. Brit: [via]
‘My Revolutions’ squirm-inducing
(Morningnews) ‘My Revolutions’ is a room, floorboards missing, door kicked in, strangely painted altar at the other end nailed to a smelly wall, and an open door leading to other rooms, none of them really comfortable. (ht: jabberwock)
Appalling farrago
(Guardian) Kunzru on writing: You fleetingly believe you’ve nailed that sentence and are destined to be immortal, only to be confronted the next morning with an appalling farrago of cliches.
Kunzru and Shteyngart
(New Yorker) Kunzru: ‘It’s my great misfortune to have been born into a dead empire’... In NY, nobody treats short, furry Shteyngart like crap — they pet him. His mom prints out every negative thing that gets written about him in Russia.
‘Fellow Traveller’
(Guardian Fiction) Hari Kunzru: Once Dolly and I got really plastered together. She opened a bottle of Baijiu white spirit and laughed into her hands and told me filthy Cantonese stories about castrating dragon-ladies and toad-like lechers. (ht: Shashwati)
Diaz pimps Kunzru’s ‘Revolutions’
(Bookcriticscircle) Junot Diaz: Hari Kunzru is burning up in ‘My Revolutions.’ He spins a superb tale and his narrator plummets down the radical rabbit-hole.
‘Revolutions’ mundane but politically subtle
(New Yorker) Kunzru’s prose seems unwilling to bestir itself, but he’s capable of bleak precision: -Prosthetic-pink iced buns lying like hospital patients under glass. -There would be no place for us in the world we’re trying to build.
India: Nasrin can stay, but only in hiding
(Guardian) India told Taslima Nasrin she could stay, but only in hiding with no visitors or trips outside, i.e. house arrest. She wrote of Muhammad’s 12 wives. Kunzru: ‘The Indian government is trying to kick this into the long grass.’ Like Dutch and Ayaan Ali.
Kunzru’s fantasy epoch
(NYT) ‘My Revolutions’: They berate guests as pigs, fling wine and kiss. The radicals watch one another make love. Everyone is experimenting, trying to achieve escape velocity. Anna, a radical feminist, insists he humiliate her in bed.
Fear drives the slush pile
(Guardian) I ask ‘Britain’s oldest literary agency,’ ‘How does one become solicited?’ There’s no reply. Another agent accepts ‘unsolicited’ submissions, which is how he found Hari Kunzru. ‘Lord of the Rings’ was also unsolicited.
Another million-dollar South Asian book deal
(HT) Hari Kunzru earned a £1.25M advance for the UK, US and European rights to ‘The Impressionist.’ ‘In London’s Banglatown, the slang is one-third Jamaican, one-third Bangladeshi and one third Cockney.’
‘My Revolutions’ feels repetitive
(Guardian) Kunzru dares you to care about a time when bombers still gave warnings. Well before the end, one revolution feels like another, and all the epiphanies cancel out.
Raymond Chandler-- with songs
(Indep) Hari Kunzru: ‘Sacred Games’ is to a normal novel what a Bollywood flick is to a romcom. It’s a classical underworld epic, just like the masala movies which it’s inspired by. Raymond Chandler with songs.
Kunzru’s next novel: ‘My Revolution’
(FT) ‘My Revolution’ is about a man who drifts into radical left-wing politics in the late ’60s. Kunzru rejected the �5,000 Rhys prize because it was sponsored by the Mail, which showed “hostility towards black and Asian people."
Kunzru calls for end to pandering
(Guardian) Sunny Hundal, Hari Kunzru, others call for end to prominence of Muslim Council of Britain. Their arguments should be treated as one among many, as lobby groups, not community representatives.
Maldives opposition rally broken by gov’t
(Guardian) Hari Kunzru, who is reporting from the Maldives, said police had used pepper sprays and batons to disperse people, ejecting opposition supporters from cafes and harassing those who spoke to journalists.
How to spend your advance
(ToI) Hari Kunzru, who received $400,000 for his first novel The Impressionist, spent some of the money doing up his London house and taking a long motoring holiday in the US.
Highest advances for desi lit
(ToI) Indian-British writer Hari Kunzru struck a million-pound-plus, two-book deal with UK publishers Hamish Hamilton. But the highest bagged by an Indian is Vikram Seth’s �1.3 million for ‘Two Lives.’
Hari Kunzru collaborates with Eggers
(Guardian) At a British literary fest, Hari Kunzru read a new story written, in appropriately Eggers-esque style, for Dave Eggers’s 826 Valencia Writing Project, which also sells pirate supplies. (Eggers’ Brooklyn writing project sells superhero supplies.)