The first nonfiction collection by internationally acclaimed writer and translator Amit Majmudar, Black Avatar combines elements of memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism. The eight pieces in this deeply engaging volume reflect author Amit Majmudar’s comprehensive studies of American, European, and Indian traditions, as well as his experiences in both suburban Ohio and the western Indian state of Gujarat. The volume begins with the title piece, a fifteen-part examination of “How Colorism Came to India.� Tracing the evolution of India’s bias in favor of light skin, Majmudar reflects on the effects of colonialism, drawing upon sources ranging from early Sanskrit texts to contemporary film and television. Other essays illuminate subjects both timely and timeless. “The Ramayana and the Birth of Poetry� discusses how suffering is portrayed in art and literature (“The spectrum of suffering: slapstick on one end, scripture on the other, with fiction and poetry . . . in the vastness between them�), while in “Five Famous Asian War Photographs�—a 2018 Best American Essays selection—Majmudar analyzes why these iconic images of atrocity have such emotional resonance. In “Nature/Worship,� another multi-part piece, the author turns his attention to climate change, linking notions of environmentalism to his ancestral tradition of finding divinity within the natural world, connections that form the basis of religious belief. Perhaps the greatest achievement of these wide-ranging essays is the prose itself—learned yet lively, erudite yet accessible—nimbly revealing the workings of a wonderfully original mind.

Mala and Ronak are adults now. They've married, begun their own families and moved away from the suffocating world of their first generation immigrant parents. But when they learn their mother has only months to live, the focus of their world returns to her home. Having shown little interest in the Indian cuisine they eat at every gathering, Mala decides to master the recipes her mother learned at her own mother's knee. And as they cook together, mother and daughter begin to confront the great divisions of their lives, and finally heal their fractured relationship. But when Ronak comes up with a plan to memorialise his mother, the hard-won peace between them is tested to its limits. Written with tenderness and wry compassion, Amit Majmudar has captured anew the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations.

When Mala and Ronak learn that their mother has only a few months to live, they are reluctantly pulled back into the Midwestern world of their Indian immigrant parents. In the brief time between diagnosis and deterioration, busy, efficient Mala commits to mastering her mother's slow art of Indian cooking. Perfecting the raita and the rotli, the two begin not only to work together but also to talk, confronting their deepest divisions and failures. But when Ronak hits upon the idea of selling their cooking-as-healing experience as a high-concept memoir, immigrant and native-born must find a way to cross this last divide.
With grace, acuity, and wry compassion, in "Abundance," Amit Majmudar has written anew the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignant, the tangled ties between generations.

"Unforgettable." --Boston Globe As India is rent into two nations with the creation of Pakistan, communal violence breaks out on both sides of the new border and streaming hordes of refugees flee from blood and chaos. At an overrun train station, Shankar and Kenshav, twin Hindu boys, lose sight of their mother and go in search of her. A young Sikh girl, Simran Kaur, has run away from her father who would rather poison her than see her defiled. And Ibrahim Masud, an elderly Muslim doctor, limps toward the new Muslim state of Pakistan, rediscovering on the way his role as a healer. A dramatic, luminous story of families and nations broken and formed, "Partitions," "written with piercing beauty, alive with moral passion and sorrowful insight, is] a rueful masterpiece" ("Kirkus Reviews," starred review).