IN PERSON - Jai Chakrabarti - A SMALL SACRIFICE FOR AN ENORMOUS HAPPINESS

Brazos Bookstore will host Jai Chakrabarti in person on Tuesday, March 7 at 6:30pm.

Jai Chakrabarti will be in conversation with Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.

This event will be hosted in partnership with Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts.

An immersive, globe-trotting short story collection about families that cross borders from the National Jewish Book Award-winning author of A Play for the End of the World (“an impressive debut”—Meg Wolitzer).

In the fourteen masterful stories that make up this collection, Jai Chakrabarti crosses continents and cultures to explore what it means to cultivate a family today, across borders, religions, and race. In the title story, a closeted gay man in 1980s Kolkata seeks to have a child with his lover’s wife. An Indian widow, engaged to a Jewish man, struggles to balance her cultural identity with the rituals and traditions of her newfound family. An American musician travels to see his guru for the final time—and makes a promise he cannot keep. A young woman from an Indian village arrives in Brooklyn to care for the toddler of a biracial couple. And a mystical agent is sent by a mother to solve her son’s domestic problems. Throughout, the characters’ most vulnerable desires shape life-altering decisions as they seek to balance their needs against those of the people they hold closest. The stories in A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness capture men and women  struggling with transformation and familial bonds; they traverse the intersections of countries and cultures to illuminate what it means to love in uncertain times; and they showcase the skill of a storyteller who dazzles with the breadth of his vision.

Jai Chakrabarti's short fiction has appeared in numerous journals and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Short Stories, and has been awarded a Pushcart Prize. His novel, A Play for the End of the World, won the National Jewish Book Award’s Goldberg Prize for Debut Fiction, was named the Jewish Fiction Award Honor Book by the Association of Jewish Libraries, and was longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Chakrabarti was an Emerging Writer Fellow with A Public Space and received his MFA from Brooklyn College. He was born in Kolkata, India, and now splits his time between the Hudson Valley and Brooklyn, New York.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an award-winning and bestselling author, activist, and professor. Her work has been published in over fifty magazines, including The Atlantic and The New Yorker, and included in The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. Her books have been translated into twenty-nine languages, including Dutch, Hebrew, Bengali, Russian, and Japanese. Several have been used for campus-wide reads and made into films and plays. She teaches at the University of Houston.