Preview
  • A Time Outside This Time

  • A Novel
  • By: Amitava Kumar
  • Narrated by: Amitava Kumar
  • Length: 8 hrs and 33 mins
  • 4.8 out of 5 stars (5 ratings)

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A Time Outside This Time

By: Amitava Kumar
Narrated by: Amitava Kumar
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Publisher's summary

A blistering novel about a writer’s creative response to the daily onslaught of fake news, memory, and the ways in which truth gives over to fiction

“An absorbing portrait of an inspired artist in the midst of our maddening cultural moment.” (Ayad Akhtar, author of Homeland Elegies)

When Satya, a professor and author, attends a prestigious artists' retreat to write, he finds the pressures of the outside world won’t let up: the president rages online; a dangerous virus envelops the globe; and the twenty-four-hour news cycle throws fuel on every fire. For most of the retreat fellows, such stories are unbearable distractions, but for Satya, who sees them play out in both America and his native India, these Orwellian interruptions begin to crystallize into an idea for his new novel, Enemies of the People, about the lies we tell ourselves and one another. Satya scours his life for instances in which truth bends toward the imagined and misinformation is mistaken as fact.

Mixing Satya’s experiences - as a father, husband, and American immigrant - with newspaper clippings, the president’s tweets, and observations on famous works of art, A Time Outside This Time captures a feverish political moment with intelligence, beauty, and an eye for the uncanny. It is a brilliant interrogation on life in a post-truth era and an attempt to imagine a time outside this one.

©2021 Amitava Kumar (P)2021 Random House Audio
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Critic reviews

“Kumar’s prose is magnetic. Using a sparse but intimate telling, Kumar’s writing enraptures the reader with each turn of Satya’s investigations."—Sara Webster, Chicago Review of Books

“As Satya uncovers the ‘truth of fiction,’ Kumar provides a shimmering assault on the Zeitgeist.”—The New Yorker

“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

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Deep meditation on the angst of our times

Lovely narration with native cadence. Opened up a portal for stock taking of lived truths.

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