From the acclaimed author of The Lovers, a one-of-a-kind novel about fake news, memory, and how truth gives way to fiction.
Satya is an Indian writer living in New York. When he attends a prestigious artist’s retreat in Italy, Satya finds the pressures of the outside world won’t let up: a dangerous virus envelopes the globe; Prime Minister Modi wants his citizens to bang plates and pots at 9 p.m.; President Trump continues spreading misinformation online; and the 24-hour news cycle throws fuel on the fire. For most fellows at the retreat, such stories are unbearable distractions; but, for Satya, these Orwellian interruptions begin to crystallize into an idea for his new novel, about the lies we tell ourselves and each other. Knitting together accounts of lynching, Trump’s tweets, newspaper clippings, childhood memories from Patna, Satya’s investigation into a killing near Kolkata, and his tales as a husband, father, and teacher, A Time Outside This Time is a brilliant meditation on life in a post-truth era. Balancing the public and private, the imagined and the real, Amitava Kumar ushers us across time and space in the name of art and humanity alike, capturing the chaos and dishonesty of the present with intelligence, beauty, and an eye for the uncanny.
Amitava Kumar is the author of Writing Badly Is Easy; The Lovers; A Matter of Rats: A Short Biography of Patna; Home Products, which was shortlisted for the Crossword Prize; and A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb, which received the Page Turner Award. Kumar’s writing has appeared in Caravan, Harper’s, The Guardian, New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times. His essay ‘Pyre’, first published in Granta, was selected by Jonathan Franzen for Best American Essays 2016. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016. Kumar is Professor of English at Vassar College.
Read More‘In this age of lies, can we rely on fiction to cover the facts? Amitava Kumar’s entertaining and incisive A Time Outside This Time provides a convincing answer. This novel is both necessary and beautiful.’
—Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild
Amitava Kumar has the precious ability to write across borders and cultures. This brilliant, anguished novel offers an essential vantage point to our agitated and bewildering world.
—Joseph O’Neill, author of Netherland
‘Kumar’s marvelous book channels Orwell in its outline of our dilemmas with disinformation. Sensuous and searching, this is an absorbing portrait of an inspired artist in the midst of our maddening cultural moment.’
—Ayad Akhtar, author of Homeland Elegies
‘A brilliant, expansive account of one man’s attempt to follow his moral compass through a maze of disinformation and discord. Kumar has an uncanny ability to find and illuminate the radiance that remains in our half-ruined world.’
—Jenny Offill, author of Weather
‘Amitava Kumar’s prose is beautiful, deft, and full of memorable details; his narration is marked by immense curiosity, kindness, and clarity of thought. He seems to be writing in real time, trying to comprehend, with admirable hope and patience, how to retain faith in literature, in democracy, in the kindness of others. A Time Outside This Time is a courageous book, incredibly relevant for the present moment and crucial for imagining a better future.’
—Aleksandar Hemon, author of The Lazarus Project