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Stories
by Nishanth Injam
An emotionally rich portrait of contemporary India and its diaspora and a yearning rendering of the people and places we call home, from a major new literary talent.
Vivid, vibrant, and unwaveringly affecting, The Best Possible Experience brings us intimate, impeccably realized accounts of individuals living in one of the most populous countries in the world, and its American diaspora, all haunted, in every sense of the word, by a loss of home.
Classically elegant in prose and consistently modern in outlook, Injam's stories question what it means to have a home, to return home, and show, above all, that home is not a place so much as a people ready to accept you as you are. We see a young man trapped on a bus to visit his parents as his fellow passengers vanish into the restroom. A family, newly in America, determined to host a perfect luncheon for their son's white classmate, with no idea what to serve him. A woman who returns to a small village in India every summer to visit the grandfather who raised her, who lives with the ghosts of his son and wife. And a man preparing for his Green Card interview with the American woman he's paid to marry him.
A sui generis talent, Injam first started writing after coming to America from India in his twenties. The Best Possible Experience, his profoundly personal debut collection, delivers a universal inquiry into the idea of belonging and preserves in writing a home he left behind before it was lost to him forever.
"Dynamic and insightful…Injam succeeds in equal measure with the variety of styles, and he offers enriching details about the various experiences his characters face as immigrants and offshore workers. This is a triumph."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Eleven gems make up Injam's stellar debut short-story collection showcasing exquisite quotidian beauty haunted by seemingly inevitable loss…The Best Possible Experience, which proves to be exactly what Injam provides lucky readers."
—Booklist (starred review)
"Meticulously crafted narratives…Eloquent meditations on grief…An array of characters and circumstances that capture contemporary concerns with grace; the language, well-rendered details, and strong story structures combine to deliver revelations. Injam's title story, in particular, is a testament to his command of the short form."
—Kirkus Reviews
"Hilarious, heartrending, and wise, Nishanth Injam's stories made me want to cast all else aside and return home."
—Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning
"The Best Possible Experience is a full-hearted, brilliant debut full of necessary beauty. Injam writes of longing, of love, of home and of the Indian diaspora, and as one reads the stories, they find that together they create an epic mosaic of life."
—Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, New York Times-bestselling author of Friday Black and Chain-Gang All-Stars
"In Nishanth Injam's enthralling, deeply intimate stories, characters contend with what it takes to survive grief, heartbreak, disappointment, another culture, and each other. Full of surprises and truly breathtaking moments, this is an exquisite debut!"
—Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
"The stories in The Best Possible Experience paint a gorgeous and devastating portrait of what it costs, literally and psychically, to make a new life away from home. Nishanth Injam has a gift for capturing complex characters facing the unsettling strangeness of unfamiliar places and increasingly unfamiliar selves. This is a graceful and sophisticated debut from a wonderful new writer."
—Danielle Evans, author of The Office of Historical Corrections
"These hauntingly beautiful stories of arrivals and departures, of love and loss, are a reminder of the transporting power of fiction. The Best Possible Experience is quite possibly the best debut collection of the year."
—Peter Ho Davies, author of A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself
This information about The Best Possible Experience was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Nishanth Injam received an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers' Program at the University of Michigan. He received a PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and a Cecelia Joyce Johnson Award from the Key West Literary Seminar. His work has appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Georgia Review (which won the 2022 ASME Award for Fiction for its publication of his story), Catapult's Best Debut Short Stories 2021, and The Best American Magazine Writing 2022. Born in Telangana, India, he now lives in Chicago.
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