A Time Outside This Time
with Amitava Kumar
Hosted by Sean Wilson Podcast Fiction
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.
Don’t miss this conversation between the Festival’s Sean Wilson and Amitava Kumar, the acclaimed author of Immigrant, Montana. His latest, A Time Outside This Time, is a one-of-a-kind novel about fake news, memory, and the ways in which truth can be not only stranger than fiction, but a fiction of its own.
When a writer named Satya attends a prestigious artist retreat, he finds the pressures of the outside world won't let up: President Trump rages online; a dangerous virus envelops the globe; and the 24-hour news cycle throws fuel on every fire. For most of the retreat fellows, such stories are unbearable distractions; but for Satya, these Orwellian interruptions begin to crystalize into an idea for his new novel, Enemies of the People, about the lies we tell ourselves and each other. Satya scours his life for moments where truth bends toward the imagined, and misinformation is mistaken as fact.
Sifting through newspaper clippings, the President's tweets, childhood memories from India, and moments as an immigrant, a husband, father, and teacher, A Time Outside This Time captures our feverish political moment with intelligence, beauty, and an eye for the uncanny. It is a brilliant meditation on life in a post-truth era. In the midst of the global pandemic, stretching on indefinitely, this piercing novel flawlessly captures the sentiment on everyone's mind of how impossible it can feel to remember, or to imagine, a time outside of this one.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
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