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| photo: Christine Forbes | |
Malavika Kannan is a Tamil American writer. Across genres, her work explores identity, power, kinship, and desire in modern, apocalyptic times. Her nonfiction has appeared in New York magazine, the Nation, the Washington Post, Teen Vogue, Autostraddle, the Emancipator, and elsewhere. Her debut novel is Unprecedented Times (Holt, August 18, 2026), about college students navigating love and life during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Handsell readers your book:
A portrait of a generation forged by the twin hellfires of the Internet and the pandemic. It is a love letter to the girls and gays, and it reads like a Facetime call with your worst-behaved friend. If you are a deep-feeling young woman (or love one), this is for you!
On your nightstand now:
Fieldwork as a Sex Object by Meena Kandasamy is forthcoming later this year and is a sharp, exciting Internet novel from the Indian subcontinent about feminism, sexuality, caste, and more. If we thought the stakes of digital warfare against women in the West are high, Kandasamy's portrait of India under fascism is eye-opening!
Favorite book when you were a child:
I was a huge Harry Potter stan and ran a fan account on Instagram with a few thousand followers (which is like a million followers in 2026 inflation).
Your top five authors:
Adrienne Rich; James Baldwin; Arundhati Roy; Viet Thanh Nguyen; and Vauhini Vara, who I especially think is the coolest South Asian American writer at work right now. I chose them because they each have a wide body of work across fiction and nonfiction, an unmistakable voice, and a bibliography that is banger after banger.
Book you've faked reading:
I somehow escaped college without studying many European classics, but that means I have to pretend to understand the hype about Jane Austen.
Book you're an evangelist for:
The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan has the smartest and most cogent critiques of patriarchy, choice, and desire in the 21st century.
Book you've bought for the cover:
How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell, with its iconic title and subtitle that soft-launched a now generation-defining phrase "Attention Economy," was The Moment in 2019 with its floral pink cover. I love that the softness, femininity, and self-help veneer of the cover belies one of the sharpest indictments of capitalism and technology of our times.
Book you hid from your parents:
It took me a while to work up the courage to give my parents my own book, Unprecedented Times!
Book that changed your life:
My friend Sarah Thankam Mathews's All This Could Be Different is a cult classic among young queer people of color for a reason. Reading a galley of this novel in 2021 changed my life by giving me a model for the kind of coming-of-age novel I wanted to write: with an ensemble cast, overt and earnest politics, and sense of swag! I even wrote a college paper about how it was departing from an older, mustier, neoliberal tradition of South Asian American literature. I felt like this book helped me understand my place within a larger tradition and expand what was possible for myself.
Favorite line from a book:
Few writers move me like the poet Adrienne Rich. A line from her poem "Diving into the Wreck" inspires the final lines of Unprecedented Times, and I'm toying with an excerpt from her heartbreaking poem "on the burning of paper instead of children" as an epigraph for my next book, Rage Bait. Here are some lines that particularly move me from that poem:
"I am composing on the typewriter late at night, thinking of today. How well we all spoke. A language is a map of our failures.... Some of the suffering are: it is hard to tell the truth; this is America; I cannot touch you now. In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.... The typewriter is overheated, my mouth is burning. I cannot touch you and this is the oppressor's language."
Five books you'll never part with:
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin, The Weave of My Life by Urmila Pawar, Zami by Audre Lorde, Valencia by Michelle Tea. All technically perfect, bighearted books about people who love deeply and are very moved by the world.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
I've reread Chanel Miller's courageous survivor memoir, Know My Name, a couple times since it's come out, in a different headspace each time, and each one has been a revelation. There are few books I've read that are so honest and uplifting about the question of how to metabolize pain and violence we encounter in life.