Malavika Kannan: Kannan, M: Unprecedented Times, Flexibler Einband

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Malavika Kannan establishes herself as the literary voice of Gen Z in this piercing coming-of-age narrative

Which comes first: experience or narrative? Rishi thinks she knows the answer as she arrives on campus for her first year at Stanford. Her future is set-she's going to leave behind the strict trappings of her Indian-American childhood in Florida, embrace her queer identity, experiment with love, and write all about it. Within a few months, she gets a new tattoo, makes her first real best friend, falls in love with her situationship, and even gets her heart broken. Rishi's first semester Asian American Autofiction final practically writes itself.

What is not a part of Rishi's plan, however, is the onset of the COVID pandemic. As the outside world becomes a terrifying place, she finds more and more solace in the friendships she's made. In lieu of virtual college, Rishi and her classmates join a farm collective and grapple with America's political situation and growing disillusionment...along with sexual tension and responsibility. It's only when those relationships, too, start fracturing under the stress of careless decisions, unrequited crushes, jealousies, and, yes, the unprecedented times, that Rishi begins to question her own story.

Unprecedented Times captures the beauty, frustration, love, and pain that exists in relationships between best friends, between lovers, between mothers and daughters, and between storytellers and themselves. Malavika Kannan's fresh, arresting novel captures is also a testament to the power of self-narrativizing for first-generation Americans: of writing oneself into existence where no previous script exists.