In a rapidly warming world, it’s crucial to hold onto hope and preserve creativity to dream up new possibilities for the future. Like trees providing shade and literature offering the perfect words for our feelings, art is our refuge in times of uncertainty.
The book is a combination of pictures, photographs, writings, and memories related to the world around us. It is a mixture of profound feelings that help us better understand and relate to nature and our fellow human beings.
In his book, Amitava Kumar demonstrates how renowned authors often start their work by jotting down ideas in notebooks, citing famous figures like Virginia Woolf, John Berger, Mohandas Gandhi, and Shiva Naipaul.
Kumar’s notebooks capture the essence of his travels through detailed accounts and illustrations. They showcase the beauty of mountains, rivers, parks, highways, and even a prison visit, illustrating the power of observation in truly experiencing the world.
The Green Book offers a deep look into the perspective of an artist capturing the changing world around them in words and images, following the journey that began with The Blue Book and continued with The Yellow Book.
Amitava Kumar is the author of several books of fiction and non-fiction. His work has appeared in Granta, the New York Times, Harper’s, and several other publications. He has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and is currently a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Library. His novel Immigrant, Montana was on the Best of the Year lists at the New Yorker and the New York Times, as well as on Barack Obama’s list of favourite books of 2018. His 2021 novel A Time Outside This Time was described by the New Yorker as a ‘shimmering assault on the Zeitgeist’. The Blue Book: A Writer’s Journal, published by HarperCollins in 2022, met with a very positive response from readers and critics alike. My Beloved Life, his latest novel, will be out soon. Kumar is a professor of English at Vassar College in upstate New York.
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