Center for the literary arts in New York State
FACULTY AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT: GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES
Aashish Kaul and Thomas Bass
4:30 p.m. Thursday, October 9, 2025
Conversation / Q&A
University at Albany
Multi-Purpose Room, Campus Center West
1400 Washington Avenue Albany NY 12222 - See map.
Aashish Kaul, UAlbany Associate Professor of English, is the author of the new novel, Bliss Mountain (2025). Moving from New York to London, Sydney, Delhi, the mid-Hudson region and the vale of Kashmir, the novel blends finance, architecture, literature, geopolitics and observations of nature to offer a kaleidoscopic view of our globalized and fragmented moment in history.
Kaul’s previous book was The Queen’s Play (2015), a chess-inspired novel that the Sunday Guardian named a “Best Book of the Year.” Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee said, “Aashish Kaul's stories…. lead us directly into the territory of late modernism, of Borges and Beckett and Nabokov.”
Thomas Bass, UAlbany Professor of English and Journalism, is the author of Return to Fukushima (2025), a new account of the aftermath of the 2011 nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan. Bass chronicles the slow reclamation of Fukushima by those who continue to live in the nuclear exclusion zone — how, little-by-little, people are learning to live with radioactivity, decontaminate their fields, monitor their food, and prepare for the next tsunami.
Noam Chomsky called the book, “Fascinating . . . a compelling message about a crucial question―one so crucial that it bears on the survival of the earth.” Bass is the author of eight books, including The Spy Who Loved Us: The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An's Dangerous Game (2009).