The Best Possible Experience: Stories by Nishanth Injam
This time we're reading The Best Possible Experience: Stories by Nishanth Injam (224 pgs). Hope to see you then! About the book: 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 in 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, Nishanth Injam’s stories question what it means to have a home and to return home, and show, above all, that home is not a place so much as it is people who are ready to accept you as you are. We see a young man trapped on a bus on the way 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, a man who lives with the ghosts of his son and his wife. And a man preparing for his green card interview with the American woman he has paid to marry him. A sui generis talent, Injam first started writing after coming to the United States 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 the home he left behind, before it was lost. Because Meetup charges organizers like me $389.76 annually, there is a $1 suggested donation. If you'd like to contribute, you can do so at the meetup or by venmo (I'll post the info afterwards).
