Deepak Unnikrishnan's Critical Reads
The below was originally posted on the Restless Books blog:
In advance of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing-winner Deepak Unnikrishnan's March 22 event at Seminary Coop, the great Chicago bookstore asked him to participate in their “Reading is Critical” series, in which they invite visiting authors to submit a selected reading list of “Critical Reading”— titles that the author finds, personally, critical. We find Deepak's list to be so essential and illuminating—not only as a background for his debut novel, Temporary People, but also as a guide to some of the most vital contemporary and classic world literature—that we're sharing it here as well. Happy reading!
It took me a while to finish Temporary People. As I wrote and rewrote the work I realized I needed to read more to get better at what I wanted my work to do. I suppose you could say in order to write I needed to read and be better informed. And occasionally, watch things, like films. The following books (and other visual mediums) have profoundly influenced the way I see the world. This list does not represent everything I adore about literature, or everything that took to make Temporary People happen. Certainly not, but all of these names have been crucial to my understanding of the written word, and what could be possible with the craft. There are other names but these will do for now. I’m grateful to them all. —Deepak Unnikrishnan
Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee
Notes from No Man’s Land, by Eula Biss
Alphabet, by Inger Christensen
English, by Jeet Thayil
The Iraqi Christ and The Madman of Freedom Square, by Hassan Blasim
Wave, by Sonali Deraniyagala
Here, by Richard McGuire
Goat Days, by Benyamin
The Beast, by Óscar Martínez
Sex: An Oral History, by Harry Maurer
The Photographer, by Didier Lefevre, Emmanuel Guibert and Frederic Lemercier
The Moon and Sixpence, by W. Somerset Maugham
One Day I Will Write About This Place, by Binyavanga Wainaina
Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs, by Wilfred Thesiger
Cities of Salt (Trilogy), by Abdelrahman Munif
Night Draws Near, by Anthony Shadid
Arabesques, by Anton Shammas
Today I Wrote Nothing, by Daniil Kharms
The nonfiction of V. S. Naipaul
The work of Primo Levi
The work of Joe Sacco
The work of Enid Blyton
Comics: Amar Chitra Katha
Jimmy Corrigan, by Chris Ware
The stories of Nadine Gordimer
The stories of Lydia Davis
The stories of Zora Neale Hurston
The stories of Kuzhali Manickavel
Rashomon and other Stories, by Ryunosuke Akutagawa
Civilwarland in Bad Decline, by George Saunders
Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie
The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy
Bury Me Standing, by Isabel Fonseca
When Memory Dies, by A. Sivananthan
Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino
The Pig and the Skyscraper, by Marco D’eramo
City of Boys, by Beth Nugent
What You’ve Been Missing, by Janet DeSaulniers
A Seventh Man, by John Berger
The Gnomes of Gnu, The Bomb and the General, and The Three Astronauts, by Umberto Eco
Parasite Rex, by Carl Zimmer
The People of Paper, by Salvador Plascencia
This is Not a Novel, by David Markson
Workers, by Sebastiao Salgado (Photographs)
Waltz With Bashir, by Ari Folman (Documentary)
Latcho Drom, by Tony Gatlif (Documentary)
Leolo, by Jean-Claude Lauzon (Film)
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