Ankur Thakkar presents BLOW YOURSELF UP
About this Event
Registration for this event is not required; however, in the case of a full event, your registration will reserve your seat.
Join us on Thursday, September 17, in Remington to celebrate the release of Ankur Thakkar's new novel, Blow Yourself Up! Ankur will be in conversation with Baltimore author Katie Moulton.
About Blow Yourself Up:
A story of first love across cities spanning the decade that transformed the internet
In the halls of an elite East Coast high school, Arjun and Payal fall in love as the world begins to tilt toward the digital. Over the next eight years, their trajectories diverge as sharply as the fractured internet itself. Payal ascends to the dizzying, dopamine-fueled heights of New York’s influencer economy, finding fame on Boost, a looping video app that is as rewarding as it is demanding. Meanwhile, in a cavernous office in Chicago, Arjun, a musician whose dreams have quieted, now cleans up the same platform’s debris, moderating the internet’s darkest videos. When a brutal act of political violence against a beloved musician goes viral, this rip in reality forces the pair to confront the motivations of the platforms they inhabit. A sharp exploration of creative ambition and the multifarious nature of identity, this is a story of love in the time of infinite scroll and a look at what we sacrifice to be seen.
Blow Yourself Up releases on Tuesday, September 15. Preorder your copy here!
Ankur Thakkar is a multimedia artist and the author of the novel Blow Yourself Up. He was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in 2025 and his writing has appeared in Guernica, PANK, and TriQuarterly. Medium selected his piece, “Swipe,” as one of the best personal essays about the internet. His artwork has been shown at the Palais de Tokyo and La Friche la Belle de Mai. He chose MFA, then NYC, and lives in Brooklyn.
Katie Moulton is the author of the audio memoir Dead Dad Club: On Grief and Tom Petty. Her essays and music criticism appear in The Believer, New England Review, Oxford American, Ninth Letter, The Village Voice, and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by MacDowell, Bread Loaf, Ragdale, the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, VCCA, and many other organizations. She lives in Baltimore and teaches creative writing at Johns Hopkins University and the Newport MFA.
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