Book Reading: Unexpected Modern Love Story About Misfits | City Lights

Submitted by the Event Organizer

A moving exploration of loss, Mukherjee delivers an intense and unexpected modern love story as Mira reconciles reality with desire.

Mira is a teacher living in the heart of Suryam, a modern bustling city in India, and the only place in the world the fickle Rasagura fruit grows. Mira lives alone, and with only the French existentialists as companions, until the day she witnesses a beautiful woman having a seizure in the park. Mira runs to help her but is cautious, for she could have sworn the woman looked around to see if anyone was watching right before the seizure began.

Rheea Mukherjee reads from: The Body Myth.
Adam Nemett reads from: We Can Save Us All About The Body Myth.

Mira is quickly drawn into the lives of this mysterious woman Sara, who suffers a myriad of unexplained illnesses, and her kind, intensely supportive husband Rahil, striking up intimate, volatile and fragile friendships with each of them that quickly become something more.

Praise for The Body Myth

“Witty, melancholic, and dramatic by turns, Rheea Mukherjee’s THE BODY MYTH is a touching love story about misfits searching for togetherness, even if that togetherness might not be healthy for all concerned… THE BODY MYTH is a compelling tale, rich in emotional undercurrents and empathy for its unconventional characters.”
—Foreword Reviews,

“Rheea Mukherjee has written a thought provoking and memorable meditation on the meaning of life. In seductive prose, THE BODY MYTH, explores the depths and boundaries of relationships, conventional and unconventional, and the meaning of intimacy in sickness and health. A fine novel.”
—Soniah Kamal, award winning author of ‘Unmarriageable: Pride and Prejudice in Pakistan’

“Like the Rasagura fruit Rheea Mukherjee so eloquently writes about, THE BODY MYTH is a tender love story at its core: sweet, sour, and bursting with wisdom. An intoxicating read.”
—Neel Patel, author of IF YOU SEE ME, DON’T SAY HI

About We Can Save Us All:

Welcome to The Egg, an off-campus geodesic dome where David Fuffman and his crew of alienated Princeton students train for what might be the end of days: America is in a perpetual state of war, climate disasters create a global state of emergency, and scientists believe time itself may be collapsing.

Funded by the charismatic Mathias Blue and fueled by performance enhancers and psychedelic drugs, a student revolution incubates at The Egg, inspired by the superheroes that dominate American culture. The arrival of Haley Roth—an impassioned heroine with a dark secret—propels David and Mathias to expand their movement across college campuses nationwide, inspiring a cult-like following. As the final superstorm arrives, they toe the line between good and evil, deliverance and demagogues, the damned and the saved.

In this sprawling, ambitious debut, Adam Nemett delves into contemporary life in all of its chaos and unknowing. We Can Save Us All is a brave, ribald, and multi-layered examination of what may be the fundamental question of our time: just who is responsible for fixing all of this?

Praise for We Can Save Us All

“Adam Nemett is the kind of smart and the kind of funny we need right now. WE CAN SAVE US ALL has the savvy, dangerous feel of early Don DeLillo.”
—Sam Lipsyte, author of ‘THE ASK’ and ‘THE SUBJECT STEVE’

“Adam Nemett has done something superheroic here. WE CAN SAVE US ALL is a wild and uproarious debut that is also wise and deeply felt. Come for the costumes, comedy, and psychedelics; stay for the searching questions about what it means to live an honorable life—to try to be one of the Good Guys—at the (maybe) end of time.”
—Justin Taylor, author of ‘THE GOSPEL OF ANARCHY’, ‘FLINGS’, and ‘EVERYTHING HERE IS THE BEST THING EVER’

“Adam Nemett is a terrific new writer, and in WE CAN SAVE US ALL he has crafted a wildly entertaining and often moving book about what it’s like to be young and rebellious in a dangerous world.”
—Tom Barbash, bestselling author of ‘ON TOP OF THE WORLD’, ‘STAY UP WITH ME’, and ‘THE LAST GOOD CHANCE’

about the authors:

Rheea Mukherjee’s fiction and non-fiction has been published in several publications including Scroll.in, Southern Humanities Review, Out of Print, QLRS and Bengal Lights, among others. Her previous stories have been Pushcart nominees, Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction Finalists, and semi-finalists for the Black Lawrence Press Award. She co-founded Bangalore Writers Workshop in 2012 and currently co-runs Write Leela Write, a Design and Content Laboratory in Bangalore. You can learn more about Rheea at www.rheeamukherjee.com.

Adam Nemett serves as creative director and author for The History Factory, where he’s written award-winning nonfiction books for Lockheed Martin, Brooks Brothers, City of Hope Medical Center, and Huntington Bank, and directed campaigns for 21st Century Fox, Adobe Systems, HarperCollins, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, New Balance, Pfizer and Whirlpool. An excerpt of his debut novel, WE CAN SAVE US ALL, was anthologized in The Apocalypse Reader. He is the writer/director of the feature film, The Instrument (2005). Adam’s work has been published, reviewed and featured in Variety, LA Weekly, The New Yorker, Washington Post, The Brooklyn Rail, as well as many others.

About the publisher:

Unnamed Press is an independent publisher based in Los Angeles, California. Unnamed Press publishes literary fiction and non-fiction, with an emphasis on debuts by women, underrepresented voices and people of color, as well as internationally focused speculative and fantasy.

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