Naomi Kanakia’s fourth novel is out for your Pride reading list. The Default World was published and released by Feminist Press on May 28. The story centers on a trans woman who is on the precipice of a bold lifestyle.
Years after fleeing San Francisco and getting sober, a trans woman named Jhanvi has made a life for herself working at a grocery co-op and saving for her surgeries. But when her friend–and sometimes more–Henry mentions that he and his techie festival-goer friends spent $100,000 to transform a warehouse basement into a sex dungeon, Jhanvi starts wondering if there’s a way to exploit gullible idiots. She returns to San Francisco, hatching a plan to marry Henry for his company’s generous healthcare benefits.
Jhanvi enters a world of beautiful, decadent fire eaters and their lavish sex parties. As her pretensions to cynicism and control start to fade, she develops a Gatsby-esque attraction to these happy young people and their bold claims of unconditional love. But do any of her privileged new friends really like or accept her? Her financial needs expose the limits of a community built on limitless self-expression, and soon she has to choose between doing what’s right, and doing what’s right for her.
This novel skewers privileged leftist millennial tech culture and asks whether “found family” is just another of the 21st century’s broken promises.
Kanakia is the author of four novels, including We Are Totally Normal, Enter Title Here, and Just Happy to Be Here and The Default World. She is also the author of a nonfiction book, What’s So Great about Great Books. Her stories, poetry, and essays have been published in American Short Fiction, Asimov’s, Gulf Coast, LitHub, Lightspeed, Indiana Review, and others. Naomi has an MFA from Johns Hopkins, and she has received fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Lambda Literary Foundation. Originally from Washington, D.C., Kanakia now lives in San Francisco with her wife and daughter.
–From staff reports