One of this year’s most touted novels, debut and otherwise,  in the US and in India, is former Wall Street Journal technology reporter and New Yorker business editor Vauhini Var’s remarkable The Immortal King Rao (W.W. Norton). Presently living in Colorado, and coming from a Dalit background which she writes out of here, she has, in this fabulistic work, created a CEO for a globalized corporate structure of governance that feels all too prophetic.

“An astonishing debut. An amazing imagination. Vara's voice is thrilling, original, dynamic and ever-surprising as her characters move from world to world, from the real to the fantastic, examining the myriad contradictory shapes in which love can appear.” - Alisha Haridasani Gupta, The New York Times.

“The Immortal King Rao is an odyssey of the grandest scale, spanning over a century and charting a Dalit immigrant's rise to world power. Vauhini Vara fuses intricate family lore with the history of tech solutionism and capitalist demagoguery, pointing forward to a dangerously likely future of corporate dominion; she writes with the meticulous clarity of a longform journalist, the explosive force of a Trident missile, and the ambition of her own brilliant protagonists … An astonishing debut. An amazing imagination. Vara's voice is thrilling, original, dynamic and ever-surprising as her characters move from world to world, from the real to the fantastic, examining the myriad contradictory shapes in which love can appear.” - Jeet Thayil.

Appearing with Vauhini Var in conversation will be Seattle writer and University of Washington professor David Shields, who has his own new, most recent book out, The Very Last Interview (New York Review of Books).

Registration for this event is optional.