Contact: Teresa S. Thomas
(412) 268-3580

For immediate release:
March 23, 2001

National Best-Selling Author and Carnegie Mellon Ph.D. Manil Suri To Read from "The Death of Vishnu" on April 20

PITTSBURGH—Manil Suri, the mathematician-author of the national bestseller "The Death of Vishnu," will talk about his Carnegie Mellon University connections and his first novel at noon on Friday, April 20, in the H&SS Auditorium, Baker Hall A-53, on Carnegie Mellon's campus. The reading is free and open to the public.

Suri earned his doctor's degree in mathematics from Carnegie Mellon in 1983. When he is not working on the remainder of the trilogy started in "The Death of Vishnu," he is teaching and conducting research at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where he is a mathematics professor. Suri is visiting Pittsburgh as part of a mathematics symposium at Carnegie Mellon. His mathematics presentation takes place on Saturday, April 21.

Suri says his two passions - mathematics and fiction - are efforts to describe the same, enormously complex universe that resists attempts to be reduced to a simple formula.

W.W. Norton published "The Death of Vishnu" earlier this year. The book weaves together the lives of contemporary Indians with stories of ancient Hindu gods. Reviewers have praised "The Death of Vishnu" as a work of "great imagination and beauty." It has been featured on National Public Radio, in Time magazine and excerpts were published in The New Yorker magazine. Overseas rights to the book have been sold in more than a dozen countries.