Indian Winter

ISBN: 9781068751578
160 pages
Date published: 20/11/2025
Paperback

For Fans Of: Maggie Nelson, Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk

PRAISE:

Indian Winter, by Kazim Ali is an exploration of the writing process, the varieties of love, and the appreciation for a place rife with beauty and sensuality. —Driftless Area Review

Indian Winter is an intimate elegy - sometimes playful, yet with a persistent undertow of fear and vulnerability. I was intrigued by the narrator's compulsion, and resistance to committing his dead lover to the page. How can you give definitive shape to memories, to grief, and to pleasure without closing down their possibilities? What does it mean to love, and be loved, when other people feel unknowable? –Kate Mascarenhas

Indian Winter is a melancholic but ultimately open-hearted novel containing truly elegant and erotic sex writing. –Yara Rodrigues-Fowler

Ali burrows into the torment of the personal – of love’s evaporation, or its arrival in a torrent. A travel novel of diasporic return, grounded in a practice of queer grief. In the search for reconnection, healing and peace, its protagonist meets disillusionment, grasping for the lifelines of poets.Ali’s prose flows bare-yet-analytic thoughts, as of a close friend, gripping our arms before their embrace. A novel on writing a novel, perhaps a diary of writing autofiction or a fictious diary, swirling between forms to see what is revealed in the tide of transformation. –Nat Raha

Kazim Ali is the author of twenty-four books of poetry, essay, fiction, and cross-genre work. He has also edited an anthology of Muslim writers and books of critical writing on poets Agha Shahid Ali, Jean Valentine, and Shreela Ray, as well as translated books by Marguerite Duras, Ananda Devi, and Sohrab Sepehri. After teaching positions at various colleges including Oberlin, Davidson, and St. Mary's College of California, he was appointed Professor of Comparative Literature and Literary Arts at the University of California, San Diego, where he is Associate Director of the Institute of Arts and Humanities.