Join the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith for an in-store event with author Shubha Sunder to discuss and celebrate the release of Optional Practical Training. She will be in conversation with writer Neema Avashia.
Told as a series of conversations, Optional Practical Training follows Pavitra, a young Indian woman who came to the US for college from Bangalore, India, and graduates in 2006 with a degree in physics. Her student visa grants her an extra twelve months in the country for work experience—a period known as Optional Practical Training—so she takes a position as a math and physics teacher at a private high school near Cambridge, Massachusetts.
What Pavitra really wants, though, is the time and space to finish a novel—to diverge from what’s expected of her within her family of white-collar professionals and to build a life as a writer. Navigating her year of OPT—looking for a room to rent, starting her job—she finds that each person she encounters expects something from her too. As her landlord, colleagues, students, parents of her students, friends of her family, and neighbors talk to and at her, they shape her understanding of race, immigration, privilege, and herself.
Throughout the book, Pavitra seems to speak very rarely; and yet, as she responds to the assumptions, insights, projections, and observations of those around her, a subtle and sophisticated portrait emerges of a young woman and aspiring artist defining a place for herself in the world.
Shubha Sunder is the author of Boomtown Girl, a story collection that won the 2021 St. Lawrence Book Award and was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction. Her writing has appeared in places like Catapult, The Common, and Narrative Magazine, and been shortlisted for Best American Short Stories. She has received fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Boston Mayor’s Office of Art & Culture, and the Corporation of Yaddo. She teaches creative writing at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
Moderator Neema Avashia is the daughter of Indian immigrants, and was born and raised in southern West Virginia. She has been an educator and activist in the Boston Public Schools since 2003, and was named a City of Boston Educator of the Year in 2013. Her first book, Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place, was published by West Virginia University Press in 2022. The book was named Best LGBTQ Memoir of 2022 by Book Riot, was one of the New York Public Library’s Best Books of 2022, and was a finalist for the New England Book Award, the Weatherford Award, and a Lambda Literary Award. She lives in Boston with her partner and daughter.
