Immigrant, Montana

(Paperback, Main)

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One winter morning, a monkey stole into Mamaji's room. He climbed on the huge white bed and finding Mamaji's pistol brandished it - they say - at my cousin, born two months after me and still in her crib. No one moved. Then, turning the pistol around, the primate brain prompting the opposable thumb to grasp the trigger, the monkey blew his brains out.

Meet Kailash. AKA Kalashnikov. Or AK-47. Or just plain AK. His journey from India has taken him to graduate school in New York where he keeps falling in love: not only with women - Jennifer, Nina, Cai Yan - but with literature and radical politics, the fuel of youthful exuberance. Each heady affair brings new learning: about himself, about America, and his relationship to a country founded on immigration, but a country that is now unsure of the migrant's place in the nation's fabric. How do you educate yourself in belonging when you are in a constant state of exile

Immigrant, Montana is the story of AK's sentimental education. His intellectual, emotional, and romantic journey gives the book a new narrative form, one that thrillingly reinvents the campus and postcolonial novel through wry, comic intelligence. A sharp cultural satire for a generation losing an ideological sense of itself, Immigrant, Montana is erotic and tender, provocative and playful - a meditation on courage and endeavour, and what it takes to truly be heroic.

Author Bio

Amitava Kumar is a journalist and author of several works of prize-winning literary non-fiction and two novels. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Harper's, the New Yorker, and Granta ('Pyre' was selected by Jonathan Franzen for The Best American Essays 2016). He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and Ford Fellowship in Literature, and is a board member at the Asian American Writers Workshop. He is currently Helen D. Lockwood Professor of English at Vassar College.