Book Club! Ramona's pick: Unprecedented Times by Malavika Kannan
About this Event
It's the powerful forces of White Whale staff picks and a community book club combined: the Pod Picks Book Club! Each month (usually on the last Thursday), a different bookseller gets to pick a book for the club to read, and they'll host the meeting, too. Book club picks will be 10% off 30 days in advance of the meeting day, to give you time to read it. And plan on grabbing a drink and a snack from the café when you come to the meeting!
Ramona's pick: Unprecedented Times by Malavika Kannan
RAMONA (they/them) is a semi-recent transplant to Pittsburgh from Austin, Texas. They love film photography, bad movies, high camp, general kitsch, and miniature versions of things. They are a brothmonger loyalist and a generally sentimental guy. Ramona can be found consuming beautiful translated fiction, absurdist short story collections, and devastating essay collections.
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One of Ms. Magazine and Debutiful’s Most Anticipated Debut Books of the Year
One of LGBTQ Read’s Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Fiction Books
One of Debutiful’s Most Anticipated Debut Books of the Year
“Unprecedented Times made me laugh, cry, and rage—often within the same paragraph . . . Kannan’s voice is hilarious and generous, and her incisive portrayal of navigating college as a second-generation immigrant kept me up late into the night. I absolutely could not put this book down.” —Lamya H, award-winning author of Hijab Butch Blues
Malavika Kannan establishes herself as an inimitable voice of Gen Z in this piercing coming-of-age debut novel.
Which comes first: experience or narrative? Rishi thinks she knows the answer as she arrives on campus for her first year at Stanford. A burnt-out youth climate activist, she used to want to save the world, but now she just wants to have gay sex. Her plan is set—she’s going to leave behind the strict trappings of her Indian American childhood in Florida, study literature, experiment with love, and write all about it. Within a few months, she makes her first best friend, falls in love with her situationship, and promptly gets her heart broken.
What is not a part of Rishi’s plan is the onset of the COVID pandemic. As the outside world becomes a terrifying place, she increasingly finds solace in the friendships she’s made. Instead of virtual college, however, Rishi and her classmates join a farm collective, where their political discussions and growing disillusionment collide with sexual tension and responsibility. It’s only when those relationships start fracturing under the stress of careless decisions, unrequited crushes, jealousies, and, yes, unprecedented times, that Rishi begins to question her own story.
Unprecedented Times captures the beauty, humor, pain, and straight-up chaos that exist in relationships between best friends and lovers, mothers and daughters, and between storytellers and themselves. Malavika Kannan’s fresh, arresting novel is a testament to the power of self-narrative for Gen Z American women: of writing oneself into existence where no previous script exists.
Where is it happening?
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