More Books by Sameer Pandya
Praise
​“An intense, funny, and absolutely necessary novel about our current times. Accomplished storyteller Pandya has given all of us teachers a compulsive read for the days, the weeks, when we feel unmoored and even a slightly bit crazy.”—Weike Wang, author of Chemistry
“Is extremely enjoyable anxiety a thing? Because that’s how I felt as I sped through Professor Raj Bhatt’s very bad week. A vital, tightly-written dive into our current swirl of confusion over privilege and power.” – Jade Chang, author of The Wangs vs. the World
“Members Only perfectly portrays how our careless words and casual comments have unintended ripple effects that couldn't possibly be predicted. This is a riveting story of misunderstanding and misrepresentation.”—Laurie Gilman, author of Class Mom and You've Been Volunteered
“In Pandya’s tense, sly debut novel (after the collection The Blind Writer) a college lecturer faces accusations of racism and anti-American bias in a California suburb over the course of a fateful week. The taut, heartrending narrative offers deep insight into the ways the characters are shaped by racism. Pandya’s sympathetic portrait of Raj’s quest for acceptance will resonate with readers.” –Publishers Weekly
“A grand slam…Pandya’s writing here is smooth, clear, funny, and often subtly beautiful. Members Only is the thoughtful page-turner we need right now.”—Booklist, starred review​
First the white members of Raj Bhatt’s posh tennis club call him racist. Then his life falls apart. Along the way, he wonders: where does he, a brown man, belong in America?
Raj Bhatt is often unsure of where he belongs. Having moved to America from Bombay as a child, he knew few Indian kids. Now middle-aged, he lives mostly happily in California, with a job at a university. Still, his white wife seems to fit in better than he does at times, especially at their tennis club, a place he’s cautiously come to love.
But it’s there that, in one week, his life unravels. It begins at a meeting for potential new members: Raj thrills to find an African American couple on the list; he dreams of a more diverse club. But in an effort to connect, he makes a racist joke. The committee turns on him, no matter the years of prejudice he’s put up with. And worse still, he soon finds his job is in jeopardy after a group of students report him as a reverse racist, thanks to his alleged “anti-Western bias.”
Heartfelt, humorous, and hard-hitting, Members Only explores what membership and belonging mean, as Raj navigates the complicated space between black and white America.​
Members Only
Praise
​“Sameer Pandya’s stories are fine-tuned and precise, and carry an emotional load that breaks open inside us in ways that are, by turns, delicate and explosive..”—Gretel Ehrlich, author of Facing the Wave
“Pandya writes with grace and authority about characters revealed to us through their fears and dreams, mistakes and successes, longing and regrets.” – Keith Scribner, author of The Oregon Experiment
“The stories are spurred along by Pandya’s gift for quiet, laconic observation that ranges from wry and ironic to snide or absurd. . . . The novella, from which the book takes its name, packs a novel’s worth of writing into the book’s second half. Rather than seeming short, it instead comes across as lean and spare, just as long as it need be, but no longer. . . . Each of the components is finely-tuned; together, they form a composite whole. I don’t suppose many people read short fiction very often; this collection is a reminder why one should.”—Peter Gordon, The Asian Review of Books
The Blind Writer
Together, the five stories and novella in this collection follow the lives of first- and second-generation Indian Americans living in contemporary California. The characters share a similar sensibility: a sense that immigration is a distant memory, yet an experience that continues to shape the decisions they make in subtle and surprising ways as they go about the complicated business of everyday living. The collection is anchored by the title novella about a love triangle between an aging, blind writer, his younger beautiful wife, and a young man desperate to start a writing life. Over several months, the three will get to know one another and move toward a moment that will change the lives of each of them forever.