Hari Kunzru

Early in Bret Easton Ellis’s bleak new novel, the narrator, Clay, a well-known writer, is negotiating a sexual transaction with a starlet who hopes he’ll put her in a movie. He’s suspicious that ‘Rain’ isn’t her real name. “Does it matter?” she asks.  Well,” Clay answers.

 I wrote about #foursquare, religious ecstasy, court masque, crying, money and the cult of Marina Abramovic for Mute magazine.

 My story, Memories of the Decadence, published most recently in Pen America #10, has won a Puschart Prize. Thanks to David Haglund and the editorial team at PEN for submitting it. 

 In the current issue of Caravan magazine, which is emerging as one of the best places to track developments in South Asian politics and culture, Amitava Kumar writes an account of our conversation at Vassar college. 

On 25th November 1970, the Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima, accompanied by a private army of extreme right wing students dressed in Ruritanian uniforms he’d commissioned from a well-known fashion designer, entered the Eastern Army Group Headquarters in Tokyo and took a senior general hostage.