Every Day I Write the Book: Notes on Style

Amitava Kumar's Every Day I Write the Book is for academic writers what Annie Dillard's The Writing Life and Stephen King's On Writing are for creative writers. Alongside Kumar's interviews with an array of scholars whose distinct writing offers inspiring examples for students and academics alike, the book's pages are full of practical advice about everything from how to write criticism to making use of a kitchen timer. Communication, engagement, honesty: these are the aims and sources of good writing. Storytelling, attention to organization, solid work habits: these are its tools. Kumar's own voice is present in his essays about the writing process and in his perceptive and witty observations on the academic world. A writing manual as well as a manifesto, Every Day I Write the Book will interest and guide aspiring writers everywhere.

Table of Contents:
Introduction. The 90-Day Book  1 Part I. Self-Help Misery  5 Good Sentences  6 Read No Secondary Literature  7 Read Junk  9 Failure  10 Running  12 Sleep  15 Kitchen Timer  16 Self-Help  17 Part II. Writing a Book: A Brief History Rules of Writing  23 In Memory of  24 Out of Place  26 Eyes on the Ground  28 The End of the Line  30 Creative Criticism  31 How to Throw Your Body  36 I'm Feeling Myself  38 Creative Writing  39 Part III. Credos Declarations of Independence  47 In Praise of Nonfiction  54 There Is No Single Way   56 How Proust Can Ruin Your Life  57 Reality Hunger  58 Depend on Your Dumbness  60 Blackness (Unmitigated)  62 Rage on the Page  63 On Training  68 Part IV. Form Light Years  71 Neither/Nor  72 Criticism by Other Means  75 Paranoid Theory  77 Erotic Style  80 I Blame the Topic Sentence  82 The Sound of the Fury  83 In Defense of the Fragment  86 Kids  88  Part V. Academic Interest Diana Studies 91 Examined Life  95 Occupy Writing  96 Academic Sentence  98 Dissertation Blah  100 Your Job Is to Know a Lot  102 Terminology  103 Anti-Anti Jargon  104 Monograph  107 Part VI. Style But Life  111 Sugared Violets  112 Voice  113 Wikileaks Manual of Style  117 Detecting Style  118 Strunk and White  120 A Clean English Sentence  122 Trade  126 Recommendation Letter  128 Part VII. Exercises Bad Writing  137 Prompt  139 Post-Its  141 Revising  142 Editing  144 Performing It  146 Rituals  149 For Graduate Students  152 Not Writing   161 Part VIII. The Groves of Academe Academe  165 Stoner  167 Common Sense  169 Titles  170 Campus Criticism  172 Farther Away  176 Accountability  177 Tenure Files  179 Journals  182 Part IX. Materials Photographs, etc.  187 "Who's Got the Address?" (a Collaboration with Teju Cole)  190 Acknowledgments  197 Appendix A. Ten Rules of Writing  201 Appendix B. PEN Ten Interview  207 Notes  211 Index  231

About the Author :
Amitava Kumar is Helen D. Lockwood Professor of English at Vassar College and the author of numerous books, including Lunch with a Bigot; A Matter of Rats; and Nobody Does the Right Thing, all also published by Duke University Press; and most recently, Immigrant, Montana: A Novel.

Review :
“Every Day I Write the Book is a persuasive instance of the sort of rare nonfiction performance Amitava Kumar invokes within its pages; he at once defines and exemplifies a vital modern nonfiction tradition. Full of pragmatic analyses and recommendations, this enthralling, important book will prove to be compelling and useful across many audiences.” - Robert Polito “Amitava Kumar's Every Day I Write the Book compels a cluster of adjectives-eclectic, ruminative, associative, probing, and personal-all of which, taken together, only begin to describe this unique writing sensibility. Turning the pages we find ourselves riding shotgun through the reading and writing life of a true cosmopolitan intellectual. Kumar instructs and inspires, running on all cylinders.” - Sven Birkerts "A guide for academic writers that is also relevant to anyone who cares about fine prose. . . . An engaging, perceptive companion for all writers." (Kirkus Reviews) "An inventive essay collection . . . a celebration of 'the value, the ease, and also the excitement of crafting writing that hasn’t been produced to please a committee.' Grad students and tenure seekers will appreciate the support Kumar’s insightful and intellectually nimble book offers, even as they buckle down to the task at hand-satisfying that committee of readers."  (Publishers Weekly) "Too often lively writing is taken as a sign of dilettantism. Things don’t have to be this way, and Kumar, who is himself both a critic and a novelist, insists that scholarship should argue and inform but also surprise and delight. . . . The best way to argue that academic books can be formally inventive is to write a formally inventive academic book. That’s what Kumar does here." - Anthony Domestico (Commonweal) "Kumar’s writing guide/commonplace book is a salve. Reading his newest is like having office hours-no, better; a drink and bookish conversation, in a bar-with your smartest, kindest teacher, or friend." - John Francisconi (Grandlife) "Kumar sets out to do for the academic writer what writers like Annie Dillard, Ursula Le Guin, Anne Lamott, and Stephen King do for the creative writer in their accounts of their own writing lives. . . . This book will interest scholars in search of alternative models for presenting their ideas and those seeking insight into an academic’s writing life. Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty." - A. M. Laflen (Choice) "An entertaining ramble through his years of analyzing his own writing process and that of many, many other authors. . . . The most amazing feature of this book is the sheer number of authors and ideas on writing that are collected in what Kumar calls, 'The 90-Day Book.'" - Gretchen Webster (Publishing Research Quarterly) "Kumar’s work effuses creative associations. Ostensibly a how-to writing guide for scholars, this book is from a different mould, one aligned with the daring and the bold: that is, with the creative. . . . In Every Day I Write the Book, you see a writer and thinker in communion with other writers and thinkers: that is, in communion with the world of ideas." - Steven E. Gumb (Journal of Scholarly Publishing)