Karan Mahajan

Last updated
Karan Mahajan
Karan Mahajan 2016.jpg
Mahajan at the 2016 Texas Book Festival
Born (1984-04-24) 24 April 1984 (age 39)
Stamford, Connecticut, U.S.
Occupation Novelist, essayist
NationalityAmerican
Subject Criticism, Fiction
Website
www.karan-mahajan.com

Karan Mahajan (born April 24, 1984) is an Indian-American novelist, essayist, and critic. [1] His second novel, The Association of Small Bombs, was a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction. [2] He has contributed writing to The Believer , [3] The Daily Beast , [4] the San Francisco Chronicle , [5] Granta , [6] and The New Yorker. [7] In 2017, he was named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. [8]

Contents

Biography

Mahajan was born in Stamford, Connecticut, and grew up in New Delhi, India. [9] He studied English and Economics at Stanford University, before receiving an MFA in fiction from the Michener Center for Writers. In addition to his writing, he has worked as an editor in San Francisco, a consultant on economic and urban planning in New York City, and a researcher in Bangalore. He currently lives in Austin, Texas.

Family Planning

Mahajan's first novel, Family Planning, was described by the San Francisco Chronicle as "Brave, breakneck, and amusing"'; [10] in The Seattle Times as "Pleasurably crazed"; [11] and in the Washington Post as "Genuinely funny" and "Profound". [12] Author Suketu Mehta described it as "The truest portrait of modern New Delhi I've read, and the funniest book of the year", [13] and novelist Jay McInerney called it "one of the best and funniest first novels I've read in years." [14]

Family Planning was published by the Harper Perennial imprint of HarperCollins, and released in the US in 2008 and the UK in 2009, with translations forthcoming in India, Germany, Italy, Spain, France, Brazil, and Korea.

The Association of Small Bombs

Mahajan's second novel, The Association of Small Bombs, about the bombing of a Delhi market, was released to widespread acclaim in 2016, with laudatory reviews appearing in The New Yorker, [15] The New York Times Book Review, [16] and The Washington Post. [17] The judges of the National Book Award for Fiction described the novel as an "epic tableau drawn by the instruments of empathy, an illuminating human expedition from India to America and back, a story that burns straight through you—incandescent, absorbing, engrossing—a novel of hope and despair, love and rage, today and tomorrow. [18] " The New York Times named the novel one of its "10 Best Books of 2016."

Bibliography

Novels

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zadie Smith</span> British novelist, essayist, and short-story writer (born 1975)

Zadie Smith FRSL is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), immediately became a best-seller and won a number of awards. She became a tenured professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University in September 2010.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Colson Whitehead</span> American novelist (born 1969)

Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead is an American novelist. He is the author of nine novels, including his 1999 debut The Intuitionist; The Underground Railroad (2016), for which he won the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; and The Nickel Boys, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction again in 2020, making him one of only four writers ever to win the prize twice. He has also published two books of nonfiction. In 2002, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chang-Rae Lee</span> Korean-American novelist

Chang-rae Lee is a Korean-American novelist and a professor of creative writing at Stanford University. He was previously Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton and director of Princeton's Program in Creative Writing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kamila Shamsie</span> Pakistani and British writer and novelist (born 1973)

Kamila Shamsie FRSL is a Pakistani and British writer and novelist who is best known for her award-winning novel Home Fire (2017). Named on Granta magazine's list of 20 best young British writers, Shamsie has been described by The New Indian Express as "a novelist to reckon with and to look forward to." She also writes for publications including The Guardian, New Statesman, Index on Censorship and Prospect, and broadcasts on radio.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Suketu Mehta</span> New York-based author

Suketu Mehta is the New York-based author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, which won the Kiriyama Prize and the Hutch Crossword Award, and was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, the Lettre Ulysses Prize, the BBC4 Samuel Johnson Prize, and the Guardian First Book Award. His autobiographical account of his experiences in Mumbai, Maximum City, was published in 2004. The book, based on two and a half years of research, explores the underbelly of the city.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nicole Krauss</span> American novelist (born 1974)

Nicole Krauss is an American author best known for her four novels Man Walks into a Room (2002), The History of Love (2005), Great House (2010) and Forest Dark (2017), which have been translated into 35 languages. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and Granta's Best American Novelists Under 40, and has been collected in Best American Short Stories 2003, Best American Short Stories 2008 and Best American Short Stories 2019. In 2011, Nicole Krauss won an award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards for Great House. A collection of her short stories, To Be a Man, was published in 2020 and won the Wingate Literary Prize in 2022.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joshua Cohen (writer)</span> American novelist and story writer

Joshua Aaron Cohen is an American novelist and story writer, best known for his works Witz (2010), Book of Numbers (2015), and Moving Kings (2017). Cohen won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Netanyahus (2021).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ben Lerner</span> American writer

Benjamin S. Lerner is an American poet, novelist, essayist, critic and teacher. The recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, Lerner has been a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Lerner teaches at Brooklyn College, where he was named a Distinguished Professor of English in 2016.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mohsin Hamid</span> British Pakistani writer

Mohsin Hamid is a British Pakistani novelist, writer and brand consultant. His novels are Moth Smoke (2000), The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013), Exit West (2017), and The Last White Man (2022).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daniel Alarcón</span> Peruvian-American novelist, journalist and radio producer

Daniel Alarcón is a Peruvian-American novelist, journalist and radio producer. He is co-founder, host and executive producer of Radio Ambulante, an award-winning Spanish language podcast distributed by NPR. Currently, he is an assistant professor of broadcast journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and writes about Latin America for The New Yorker.

Peter Orner is an American writer. He is the author of two novels, two story collections and a book of essays. Orner holds the Professorship of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and was formerly a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University. He spent 2016 and 2017 on a Fulbright in Namibia teaching at the University of Namibia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joshua Ferris</span> American author

Joshua Ferris is an American author best known for his debut 2007 novel Then We Came to the End. The book is a comedy about the American workplace, told in the first-person plural. It takes place in a fictitious Chicago ad agency experiencing a downturn at the end of the 1990s Internet boom.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yiyun Li</span> Chinese writer and professor

Yiyun Li is a Chinese-born writer and professor in the United States. Her short stories and novels have won several awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award and Guardian First Book Award for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for Where Reasons End, and the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Book of Goose. She is an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sana Krasikov</span> Ukrainian-born writer in the United States

Sana Krasikov is a writer living in the United States. She grew up in the Republic of Georgia, as well as the United States. She graduated from Cornell University in 2001 where she lived at the Telluride House, and from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. In 2017 she was named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. In 2019 The Patriots won France's Prix Du Premiere Roman Etranger prize for best first novel in translation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anthony Marra</span> American fiction writer (born 1984)

Anthony Marra is an American fiction writer. Marra has won numerous awards for his short stories, as well as his first novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, which was a New York Times best seller.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laird Hunt</span> American writer, translator, academic (born 1968)

Laird Hunt is a Singapore-born American writer, translator, and academic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chinelo Okparanta</span> Nigerian-American writer

Chinelo Okparanta is a Nigerian-American novelist and short-story writer. She was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, where she was raised until the age of 10, when she emigrated to the United States with her family.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ottessa Moshfegh</span> American author (born 1981)

Ottessa Charlotte Moshfegh is an American author and novelist. Her debut novel, Eileen (2015), won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and was a fiction finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Moshfegh's subsequent novels include My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Death in Her Hands, and Lapvona.

<i>The Association of Small Bombs</i> 2016 novel by Karan Mahajan

The Association of Small Bombs is a 2016 novel by Indian-American author and novelist Karan Mahajan. The novel is Mahajan's second, after 2012's Family Planning, and was first published in 2016 by Viking Press. The novel was named a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction. It was met with positive reviews.

The Young Lions Fiction Award is an annual US literary prize of $10,000, awarded to a writer who is 35 years old or younger for a novel or collection of short stories. The award was established in 2001 by Ethan Hawke, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, Rick Moody, Hannah McFarland, and the New York Public Library. Each year, five young fiction writers are selected as finalists by a reading committee of Young Lions members, writers, editors, and librarians. A panel of judges selects the winner.

References

  1. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2009-02-25. Retrieved 2009-02-23.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  2. The New Yorker (October 6, 2016). "The 2016 National Book Awards Finalists". The New Yorker . Archived from the original on December 11, 2023. Retrieved December 11, 2023.
  3. Mahajan, Karan (February 1, 2008). "'Suketu Mehta'". The Believer. Retrieved 10 March 2010.
  4. Mahajan, Karan (March 27, 2010). "'Peering into Kashmir's Turmoil'". The Daily Beast. Retrieved 6 April 2010.
  5. Mahajan, Karan (March 11, 2008). "Animal's People' toxically twisted'". The Believer. Retrieved 10 March 2010.
  6. Mahajan, Karan (December 1, 2009). "'Wonder Why'". Granta. Retrieved 10 March 2010.
  7. Mahajan, Karan (October 21, 2015). "'The Two Asian Americas'". The New Yorker. Retrieved 26 October 2015.
  8. "Granta's list of the best young American novelists". The Guardian. 2017-04-26. ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 2017-05-16.
  9. "karan-mahajan". karan-mahajan. Retrieved 2017-05-16.
  10. Frank, Joan (December 7, 2008). "'Family Planning,' by Karan Mahajan". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved 14 December 2009.
  11. Upchurch, Michael (January 11, 2009). "See the world — by book Three new novels — "The World a Moment Later" (from Israel), "New Lives" (Germany) and "Family Planning" (India) — offer a vicarious form of travel into the very souls of nations". The Seattle Times. Retrieved 14 December 2009.
  12. Mahajan, Karan (December 21, 2008). "'Young and Restless'". The Washington Post. Retrieved 10 March 2010.
  13. Suketu, Mehta (January 24, 2009). "'Suketu Mehta Book Pick'". The Daily Beast. Retrieved 10 March 2010.
  14. McInerney, Jay (November 18, 2008). "'Jay McInerney Book Pick'". The Daily Beast. Retrieved 10 March 2010.
  15. "An Intimate Novel of a Terror Attack". The New Yorker. Retrieved 2017-05-16.
  16. Maazel, Fiona (2016-03-15). "'The Association of Small Bombs,' by Karan Mahajan". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2017-05-16.
  17. Anderson, Patrick; Anderson, Patrick (2016-03-15). "'The Association of Small Bombs': A novel of terror based on the author's life". The Washington Post. ISSN   0190-8286 . Retrieved 2017-05-16.
  18. "The Association of Small Bombs, by Karan Mahajan, 2016 National Book Award Finalist, Fiction". Nationalbook.org. Retrieved 2017-05-16.
  19. "Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards - The 82nd Annual". Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards - The 82nd Annual. Retrieved 13 October 2017.