Malavika Kannan

Which comes 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 of writing oneself into existence where no previous script exists.

Unprecedented Times

One boy, Toby, has his laptop positioned on a low surface—maybe a coffee table—so that the camera is pointed embarrassingly at his crotch. I take a screenshot and text it to Georgia. 

ewwwwww you should use the filter that turns him into a pineapple

notice how she only jerks it to women despite thus far being just as sexually interested in men

I touch myself listlessly for hours to a rotating cast of women, including Dr. Andrea Thompson, the no-nonsense middle-aged CDC official who appears on CNN each morning to preach the ever-urgent dangers of the virus.

laying claim to queer lineage without even an attempt to engage with the queer community...

I come from two long lineages of yarn-spinners and gossipmongers, by which I’m referring to queers and Indian aunties.

this is like if someone were to satirize this book

...at school, the evil white girls were evenly matched by Black and Puerto Rican baddies...

And I say, I just want us to be good. We’re good, right? Tentatively, I put my hand atop hers. I just need the bubble to burst. She will lower her guard, she will let me back in, and I count down in my head, three, two, one—

I had so many thoughts and ideas, some of them gifts from friends...

smth smth rape is the only thing off limits to americans

But now the nightmares are back, and unfortunately, rape isn’t a subject I can joke about.

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