BOOKS
Josh recently completed his first novel, THE NEXT BIG THING. He began the novel in 2013, and it took him five years to write, during a time of rapid change in his life that included fellowships, teaching, traveling, expanding his tutoring business, and--most challenging, most affirming, most wonderful--having two children.
Set in Chicago in the 1990s, this novel tells the story of Georgie Bumkin, a shy bullied impoverished 15-year-old white girl of exceptional height, whose life is transformed when she is recruited to an all-black, all-boys, all-star basketball team. While striving for the league championship, she must navigate crosscurrents of misunderstanding to form bonds of love with two teammates: her coach’s brilliant son, whose rich home is a liberal salon of high ideals and low betrayals, and the team’s best star, whose poor tight-knit family is shattered by the hard hand of the criminal justice system. Starting from a fun, funny, fish-out-of-water premise, this retrospective first-person narrative draws readers into an increasingly charged examination of race, class, gender, prejudice, privilege, violence, and the promise—and limits—of empathy. It is based partly on Josh's own playing days as one of the only white kids in the Fellowship of Afro-American Men youth basketball league. The book combines the commercial and critical prospects of acclaimed race-related bestsellers such as Americanah and The Help, and acclaimed sports-related bestsellers such as The Art of Fielding, while calling out for social and systemic changes. In short, Josh believes that it can have a meaningful influence for the good. Above all, it is a big-hearted story of troubled families and rock-solid friendship, first love and first heartbreak, social justice and self-discovery.
Josh is also halfway through writing not one, but TWO (!) other novels. THE VIKING BALLAD OF JISHU MITRA is a picaresque adventure story about a dreamy young computer programmer from Calcutta who gives up everything to move to London when he is invited to stage an art show at the Tate Modern, only to discover upon arrival that he was invited by mistake. Making new friends and finding the means to survive, Jishu ends up embarking on a journey across continents, through the underbellies of European capitals, alongside desperate migrants in the Sahara, into and out of war zones (again by accident), and finally to San Francisco, where he stumbles into fame and fortune in the most unexpected way ...
A PLACE AT THE TABLE OF THE WORLD is the story of five undocumented refugees, each from a different continent, each fleeing a different kind of violence--sexual, political, economic, environmental--who become neighbors in a seedy London apartment building. Unwanted and uncertain, they decide to do what rich financiers do with their money, only with their bodies: find an offshore refuge. Claiming an uninhabited island off the coast of Scotland, they establish their own "safe haven" for people who have nowhere else to go. But soon their new settlement is beset by migrants, as they struggle to maintain order in their new society, and the nations of the world begin to take notice and threaten their illegal project ...
Interesting note: all three of these novels feature overlapping characters and are set in the same story-world, so together, they form a sort-of trilogy that Josh is tentatively calling A BETTER PLACE.
Set in Chicago in the 1990s, this novel tells the story of Georgie Bumkin, a shy bullied impoverished 15-year-old white girl of exceptional height, whose life is transformed when she is recruited to an all-black, all-boys, all-star basketball team. While striving for the league championship, she must navigate crosscurrents of misunderstanding to form bonds of love with two teammates: her coach’s brilliant son, whose rich home is a liberal salon of high ideals and low betrayals, and the team’s best star, whose poor tight-knit family is shattered by the hard hand of the criminal justice system. Starting from a fun, funny, fish-out-of-water premise, this retrospective first-person narrative draws readers into an increasingly charged examination of race, class, gender, prejudice, privilege, violence, and the promise—and limits—of empathy. It is based partly on Josh's own playing days as one of the only white kids in the Fellowship of Afro-American Men youth basketball league. The book combines the commercial and critical prospects of acclaimed race-related bestsellers such as Americanah and The Help, and acclaimed sports-related bestsellers such as The Art of Fielding, while calling out for social and systemic changes. In short, Josh believes that it can have a meaningful influence for the good. Above all, it is a big-hearted story of troubled families and rock-solid friendship, first love and first heartbreak, social justice and self-discovery.
Josh is also halfway through writing not one, but TWO (!) other novels. THE VIKING BALLAD OF JISHU MITRA is a picaresque adventure story about a dreamy young computer programmer from Calcutta who gives up everything to move to London when he is invited to stage an art show at the Tate Modern, only to discover upon arrival that he was invited by mistake. Making new friends and finding the means to survive, Jishu ends up embarking on a journey across continents, through the underbellies of European capitals, alongside desperate migrants in the Sahara, into and out of war zones (again by accident), and finally to San Francisco, where he stumbles into fame and fortune in the most unexpected way ...
A PLACE AT THE TABLE OF THE WORLD is the story of five undocumented refugees, each from a different continent, each fleeing a different kind of violence--sexual, political, economic, environmental--who become neighbors in a seedy London apartment building. Unwanted and uncertain, they decide to do what rich financiers do with their money, only with their bodies: find an offshore refuge. Claiming an uninhabited island off the coast of Scotland, they establish their own "safe haven" for people who have nowhere else to go. But soon their new settlement is beset by migrants, as they struggle to maintain order in their new society, and the nations of the world begin to take notice and threaten their illegal project ...
Interesting note: all three of these novels feature overlapping characters and are set in the same story-world, so together, they form a sort-of trilogy that Josh is tentatively calling A BETTER PLACE.
short stories
“Grace”
Josh’s second story in Ploughshares, nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Check it out here.
Opening Lines:
It's been a month now she's been tutoring a dead girl on Park Avenue.
She says as much into her cell. She's walking fast to the subway so she won't be late--she takes three trains. "We're doing vocab. Great Expectations."
"What's that?" her mom says. "A blond girl? Does her hair color matter?"
"Not what I said," she says, "but I guess not."
“Run”
Josh’s debut story in Ploughshares, in an issue guest edited by Alice Hoffman. Click here to buy the issue!
Opening Lines:
This is a story about pretending. Imagine my father, a boy, not the old man who bought this shuttered house I have just cleaned out, here at the tropical tip of Florida, but a boy of six, seven, eight, in a one-room school with snow-bent eaves, with another black eye, another chipped tooth, pretending he's fallen from a tractor again or was kicked by a horse...
“Neighbors,” “The Midnight Cafe Society,” “Do No Harm,” “Was”
These stories have been honored by Glimmer Train and Southwest Review.
Opening Lines of "The Midnight Cafe Society":
Fifth Street at Avenue B was quiet an hour before dawn, after the bars had shuttered and before the public school on the avenue opened its iron doors. On the corner stood a quiet café called the Delphi, whose neon sign cast a reddish glow through the dirty windows onto a dirty sidewalk. To look through those windows an hour before dawn was to look in on the peculiarities of lonely insomniacs, the weariness of waiters, and the bright hunger of bartenders and sex workers just off the job ...
“Two Girls,” “Truth and a Coffin,” “The Silence in the House”
These stories were published in The Mind’s Eye and the national anthology The Best Young Artists & Writers in America.
Opening Lines of "Two Girls":
Some years ago Priyati found herself in Uttar Pradesh with a man named Rajiv. They were in the broad eastern plains, where the country was hot and brown: land that might light all at once if you tossed a match to it ...
If publishers will keep taking them, Josh plans to keep publishing his stories, and would love to publish a collection of them entitled YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE.
Josh’s second story in Ploughshares, nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Check it out here.
Opening Lines:
It's been a month now she's been tutoring a dead girl on Park Avenue.
She says as much into her cell. She's walking fast to the subway so she won't be late--she takes three trains. "We're doing vocab. Great Expectations."
"What's that?" her mom says. "A blond girl? Does her hair color matter?"
"Not what I said," she says, "but I guess not."
“Run”
Josh’s debut story in Ploughshares, in an issue guest edited by Alice Hoffman. Click here to buy the issue!
Opening Lines:
This is a story about pretending. Imagine my father, a boy, not the old man who bought this shuttered house I have just cleaned out, here at the tropical tip of Florida, but a boy of six, seven, eight, in a one-room school with snow-bent eaves, with another black eye, another chipped tooth, pretending he's fallen from a tractor again or was kicked by a horse...
“Neighbors,” “The Midnight Cafe Society,” “Do No Harm,” “Was”
These stories have been honored by Glimmer Train and Southwest Review.
Opening Lines of "The Midnight Cafe Society":
Fifth Street at Avenue B was quiet an hour before dawn, after the bars had shuttered and before the public school on the avenue opened its iron doors. On the corner stood a quiet café called the Delphi, whose neon sign cast a reddish glow through the dirty windows onto a dirty sidewalk. To look through those windows an hour before dawn was to look in on the peculiarities of lonely insomniacs, the weariness of waiters, and the bright hunger of bartenders and sex workers just off the job ...
“Two Girls,” “Truth and a Coffin,” “The Silence in the House”
These stories were published in The Mind’s Eye and the national anthology The Best Young Artists & Writers in America.
Opening Lines of "Two Girls":
Some years ago Priyati found herself in Uttar Pradesh with a man named Rajiv. They were in the broad eastern plains, where the country was hot and brown: land that might light all at once if you tossed a match to it ...
If publishers will keep taking them, Josh plans to keep publishing his stories, and would love to publish a collection of them entitled YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE.
