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Grief, Death, Violence, Politics

Book Launch

Wednesday, May 18, 2016
7:00 PM–8:30 PM

In a discussion moderated by Sadia Shepard, the two Indian American authors Hirsh Sawhney (South Haven) and Karan Mahajan (The Association of Small Bombs) will present their latest novels and discuss political violence in India and its reverberations around the world.

With performances by Samrat Chakrabarti and Kamran Khan.

“A lyrical yet disturbing look at the grim realities of migration and American suburban life, South Haven manages to be both witty and unnerving at the same time. It is a novel that resonates long in the memory.” —Caryl Phillips, author of The Lost Child

The Association of Small Bombs is wonderful. It is smart, devastating, unpredictable and enviably adept in its handling of tragedy and its fallout. If you enjoy novels that happily disrupt traditional narratives—about grief, death, violence, politics—I suggest you go out and buy this one. Post haste.” —Fiona Maazel, The New York Times

Presented with the Indo-American Arts Council

About the Speakers

Hirsh Sawhney’s writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, the Financial Times, Outlook, and numerous other periodicals. He is the editor of Delhi Noir, a critically acclaimed anthology of original fiction, which was launched at the Rubin in 2008. He is on the advisory board of Wasafiri, a London-based journal of international literature, but lives in New Haven, Connecticut, and teaches at Wesleyan University. South Haven is his debut novel and, like his previous collection, is published by Akashic Books.

Karan Mahajan is the author of the novels The Association of Small Bombs (2016) and Family Planning (2008), which was a finalist for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. Mahajan was born in 1984 and grew up in New Delhi, India. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker Online, The Believer, NPR’s All Things Considered, and n+1, among other outlets. He currently lives in Austin, Texas, where he is at work on his third novel.

Sadia Shepard is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir The Girl from Foreign (The Penguin Press, 2008). Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Times of India, Wall Street Journal Magazine and the New York Times. Her credits as a documentary film producer include The September Issue, an inside look at Vogue, and The Education of Mohammed Hussain for HBO. She is a graduate of Wesleyan, Stanford, and the Hunter College MFA program, where she won the Bernard Cohen Short Story Prize, the Miriam Weinberg Richter Award, and the Helen Gray Cone Fellowship. She teaches at Hunter College and Wesleyan University.

Tickets: $20.00

Member Tickets: $18.00

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