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Amitava Kumar’s Five Favourite Drawing Books

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From John Berger to Sarnath Banerjee, here are five books on art that Amitava Kumar loves.

Check them out below!

Bento’s Sketchbook by John Berger (2011, 2015)

I was on a book-tour in Canada for my novel, Immigrant, Montana. In Toronto, Michael Ondaatje took this book out from his book-shelf and showed it to me. I had admired Berger for a long time but this was the first time I was seeing so many of his drawings. Unfussy drawings and philosophical meditations mixed together, a journal of seeing and thinking.

The Principles of Uncertainty by Maira Kalman (2007)

This book was also suggested to me. My friend Jenny Offill, the author of the novel Department of Speculation, had seen the drawings I was posting on Instagram. I loved Kalman’s book because it is so wonderfully original: serious, funny, whimsical. A piercing report on life, but with a light touch.

Doab Dil by Sarnath Banerjee (2019)

A sophisticated picture book in which the artists recommends other books; these are nonfiction books which become the subject of Sarnath Banerjee’s art and delectably oblique commentary. Doab Dil is a book that recommends other books, and I can do no better than recommend it, in turn, to you.

Exchanging Hats by Elizabeth Bishop (2011)

Nearly ninety years ago, the great American poet Elizabeth Bishop graduated from Vassar College where I have been teaching since 2005. Bishop, in addition to being a wonderful poet, was a skilled painter. Exchanging Hats is a collection of her drawings and paintings and, crucially, also excerpts from her letters and postcards. Bishop once said, “From time to time I paint a small gouache or watercolor and give them to friends … They are Not Art — NOT AT ALL.” But they are, they are!

Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton (2012)

Although she is currently the art editor of New York Review of Books, back when she was in her teens Shapton was training for the Olympic trials as a swimmer. Swimming Studies is made up of elegant watercolors reflecting on that past abandoned life and brief prose pieces that carry the intimacy of diary entries: “I dream about swimming at least three nights a week.”

The Yellow Book
by Amitava Kumar

One day passes. Then another. A whole succession of days turning into months and years. How to mark our separate days? The places we have been. Our individual passions, our pain. Against the blurring of years, the clarity of a…

₹ 699.0000
  • Amazon
  • Or buy from your local bookseller.
The Yellow Book
The Blue Book
by Amitava Kumar

'In those terrible days of the lockdown during the pandemic, we were all waiting. We were waiting for things to be all right. And one day, they will indeed be all right. But the dead will never come back. The…

₹ 699.0000
  • Amazon
  • Or buy from your local bookseller.
The Blue Book

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