Manil Suri

Powells.com Interviews - Manil Suri: "You are a mathematician, a professor in Applied Sciences, who writes an average of one short story each year to share informally with friends. You start a novel, but you abandon it. Eventually, you begin another, and at an academic workshop at George Washington University the writer Vikram Chandra calls your first two chapters trenchant. Then, upon returning to your workaday life, the novel goes nowhere for a year.

But another workshop, this one with Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award-winner Michael Cunningham, gets you back on track, and now here you are only two months after publication, the buzz of the book industry, a hot debut novelist on book tour, sitting for your third interview of the day. Already your book is slated for translation into thirteen languages.

"In just a few pages, Suri immerses us in a world almost unimaginably foreign from our own, yet universally understandable," Dan Cryer wrote in Newsday, calling the novel "a seamlessly constructed, quietly eloquent work of art." The New York Times Book Review, Washington Post Book World, USA Today, The Boston Globe… even Time magazine has published a rave review.

The Death of Vishnu is part-sitcom and part-meditation, a brilliant counterpoint of action and stillness. How will the Asranis ever live down the shame of their daughter's elopement with the Muslim boy upstairs? Can Mrs. Pathak recover from the public humiliation of her disastrous kitty party? Oh, and is God dying in squalor on the second floor landing of their Bombay apartment building? "I could have written a whole novel about the Pathaks and Asranis and it would have been kind of funny and entertaining," Suri explained modestly, "but I wanted to have other things in there, too."