Eyes on UMBC

"Death" Sparks a Writer's Life




For UMBC mathematics professor Manil Suri, it was a publishing debut that brought him attention in a host of national newspapers and magazines, including The New Yorker, Time, the Wall Street Journal, and the front page of The New York Times Book Review. There was also a book tour that took him across the United States and back to his native India, where the audience included many members of his family. There are 19 editions of his book worldwide that have appeared or will appear in the United States, the United Kingdom, and in translation in a host of countries in Europe as well as in India, Israel, Turkey, and Japan.

All this hoopla was not about Suri's work in the numerical analysis of partial differential equations--his area of research expertise. It was the publication of his first novel, The Death of Vishnu, that set the critics ablaze. In a plot that weaves the stories of the apartment dwellers who come upon Vishnu, the building's handyman, dying on the stair landing, Suri constructs a microcosm of Indian society that is both rich and comic. To read more, visit www.manilsuri.com.

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