BooksUnprecedented Times
Malavika Kannan establishes herself as the literary voice of Gen Z in this piercing coming-of-age narrative Which comes first: experience or narrative? Rishi thinks she knows the answer as she arrives on campus for her first year at Stanford. Her narrative is set—she’s going to leave behind the strict trappings of her Indian-American childhood in Florida, embrace her queer identity, experiment with love, and write all about it. Within a few months, she gets a new tattoo, makes her first real best friend, falls in love with her un-labeled situationship, and even gets her heart broken. Rishi’s first semester Asian American Autofiction final practically writes itself. What is not a part of Rishi’s plan, however, is the onset of the COVID pandemic. As the outside world becomes a terrifying place, she finds more and more solace in the friendships she’s made. In lieu of virtual college, Rishi and her classmates join a farm collective and grapple with America’s political situation and growing disillusionment...along with sexual tension and responsibility. It’s only when those relationships, too, start fracturing under the stress of careless decisions, unrequited crushes, jealousies, and, yes, the unprecedented times, that Rishi begins to question her own story. Unprecedented Times captures the beauty, frustration, love, and pain that exists in relationships between best friends, between lovers, between mothers and daughters, and between storytellers and themselves. Malavika Kannan’s fresh, arresting novel captures the excitement and the terror of modern young adulthood through the eyes of an unforgettable, flawed, and lovable narrator.
Malavika Kannan establishes herself as the literary voice of Gen Z in this piercing coming-of-age narrative Which comes first: experience or narrative? Rishi thinks she knows the answer as she arrives on campus for her first year at Stanford. Her narrative is set—she’s going to leave behind the strict trappings of her Indian-American childhood in Florida, embrace her queer identity, experiment with love, and write all about it. Within a few months, she gets a new tattoo, makes her first real best friend, falls in love with her un-labeled situationship, and even gets her heart broken. Rishi’s first semester Asian American Autofiction final practically writes itself. What is not a part of Rishi’s plan, however, is the onset of the COVID pandemic. As the outside world becomes a terrifying place, she finds more and more solace in the friendships she’s made. In lieu of virtual college, Rishi and her classmates join a farm collective and grapple with America’s political situation and growing disillusionment...along with sexual tension and responsibility. It’s only when those relationships, too, start fracturing under the stress of careless decisions, unrequited crushes, jealousies, and, yes, the unprecedented times, that Rishi begins to question her own story. Unprecedented Times captures the beauty, frustration, love, and pain that exists in relationships between best friends, between lovers, between mothers and daughters, and between storytellers and themselves. Malavika Kannan’s fresh, arresting novel captures the excitement and the terror of modern young adulthood through the eyes of an unforgettable, flawed, and lovable narrator.
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Find Unprecedented Times Malavika Kannan in PDF, EPUB, ebook, audiobook, print, or library editions.
1 books in catalog
Malavika (pronounced Mah-love-eeka. Take it slow, you've got this) is a Gen Z Tamil American writer. She is the author of UNPRECEDENTED TIMES (forthcoming Henry Holt 2026), a campus novel set against the apocalyptic background of the pandemic. Malavika has been praised as a "young, perhaps talented woman," "liberal twig," and also "lazy, dumb, and loose," by men online, which is another way of saying her work explores themes of modern girlhood, relationships and the self, personal and political histories, and the obliterating experience of queer desire.
Her villain origin story is that, as a teenager in Florida growing up amid a crisis of racialized gun violence, she organized with March for Our Lives, Giffords, and the Women's March, taking part in the largest American youth protest since the Vietnam War. Her debut YA novel, ALL THE YELLOW SUNS (Little & Brown 2023), is a queer coming-of-(r)age story about activism and identity set in Florida, drawing from these experiences. Malavika has been featured by Seventeen Magazine and Good Morning America, and she graduated from Stanford University in 2024.
Mal is also a frequent writer on race, gender, South Asian identity, and caste. Her reporting appears in the San Francisco Chronicle, The Emancipator, The Washington Post, Teen Vogue, and elsewhere, and she posts for an audience of 50,000 across Instagram and TikTok. Her other creative mediums are cartoons -- she has a viral comic series, Diary of a Wimpy Mal, about survivorship and identity -- and cooking; she's the co-hosts of Girls Eat Girls, a sapphic supper club in Brooklyn, where she lives and writes.
https://www.malavikakannan.com/
1 books in catalog
Malavika (pronounced Mah-love-eeka. Take it slow, you've got this) is a Gen Z Tamil American writer. She is the author of UNPRECEDENTED TIMES (forthcoming Henry Holt 2026), a campus novel set against the apocalyptic background of the pandemic. Malavika has been praised as a "young, perhaps talented woman," "liberal twig," and also "lazy, dumb, and loose," by men online, which is another way of saying her work explores themes of modern girlhood, relationships and the self, personal and political histories, and the obliterating experience of queer desire.
Her villain origin story is that, as a teenager in Florida growing up amid a crisis of racialized gun violence, she organized with March for Our Lives, Giffords, and the Women's March, taking part in the largest American youth protest since the Vietnam War. Her debut YA novel, ALL THE YELLOW SUNS (Little & Brown 2023), is a queer coming-of-(r)age story about activism and identity set in Florida, drawing from these experiences. Malavika has been featured by Seventeen Magazine and Good Morning America, and she graduated from Stanford University in 2024.
Mal is also a frequent writer on race, gender, South Asian identity, and caste. Her reporting appears in the San Francisco Chronicle, The Emancipator, The Washington Post, Teen Vogue, and elsewhere, and she posts for an audience of 50,000 across Instagram and TikTok. Her other creative mediums are cartoons -- she has a viral comic series, Diary of a Wimpy Mal, about survivorship and identity -- and cooking; she's the co-hosts of Girls Eat Girls, a sapphic supper club in Brooklyn, where she lives and writes.
https://www.malavikakannan.com/
