thenewwei

[thenewwei]

I’m very happy to announce the Kindle Ebook pre-order release of the first story in The Great American Pandemic Novel BAD AMERICANS: “On the Frontlines” AKA “Andrea’s Story.”

You can preorder this novelette now and you will get it delivered to your free Kindle app on any device on March 15, 2025! It’s only $0.99!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DWQPBK89

Each Story in BAD AMERICANS is being released once a month as a Kindle Ebook until September 2025, when the frame novel with the first six stories will be released in multiple formats including hardcover and paperback. Get your taste today!

Schedule here:

Http://tejas-desai.com

About BAD AMERICANS and “On the Frontlines”:

It's Summer 2020 and the Covid-19 Pandemic is raging. New York City has been locked down for months. 12 diverse Americans, lonely and single, are selected via a dating app competition by billionaire Olive Mixer to stay at his ornate Hamptons mansion complex for 12 nights.

During the day, the guests meet, compete, date, dine, flirt and fight. Each night, one must tell the group a story.

The narrator of "On the Frontlines," Andrea Mendoza, is a hard-working Filipino-American nurse at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, New York City, the hardest hit institution during the pandemic. Her story embodies the exhausting struggle to fight the virus and exposes the bureaucratic hurdles in the process.

"On the Frontlines" is one of the most moving stories in BAD AMERICANS. It's also a rare glimpse into the internal realities of the physical fight against the Covid pandemic at its height.

The tales in BAD AMERICANS range widely in subject, style, length and decorum. Many stories respond to each other. They trigger passionate resistance and fiery defense. They change how characters perceive each other and affect the trajectory of the frame narrative. They make us ponder the nature of storytelling itself.

More importantly, each story portrays a different aspect of American life in a vivid, accurate, innovative, entertaining and thought-provoking way.

BAD AMERICANS is the 2nd volume in the anthology series THE HUMAN TRAGEDY. Kirkus Reviews said the first volume, Good Americans "speaks volumes about the human condition and modern life in America."

I hope you enjoy this morsel of a complex recipe! #bookstagram #book #bookrelease #newrelease #newreleasebooks #literature #literaturelover #mustread #mustreadbooks #MustRead2025 #BadAmericans #thehumantragedy #humantragedy #storytelling #shortstory #shortstories #story #novelas #novel #pandemic #pandemic2020 #PandemicChallenges #pandemichistory #Decameron #realitytv #reality #realityshow #diversity #multicultural #crosscultural #culture #Satire

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DWQPBK89

[thenewwei]

Strange but fab night that included Monster Jam @ Barclays Center followed by watching hard rock all-girl band Homade and electronic beat duo West Division at Dark Room 2 in Gowanus. @homade.nyc @westdivisionmusic #rock #hardrock #electronicmusic #brooklyn #gowanus #darkroom #barclayscenter

[thenewwei]

Thanks to everyone who came out to the Combating Racism Series Dinner to celebrate our widely praised webinar series on 1/15/25! with Annette Olivia Brown, Kacper Jarecki, Fred Gitner, Mia Shah-Dand, Brenda Bentt-Peters, Jacqueline Carr. #esrt #nyla #library #authors #racism #diversity #DEI #diversityequityinclusion #diversityandinclusion #AI #artificialintelligence

[thenewwei]

Racial Profiling in the Age of TTT

Apparently the era of racial profiling has returned with the advent of TTT (Trump, Tech Bros, & Tariffs) in the TT (Turbulent Twenties). While micro-incidents occur constantly, here are a few more obvious instances that occurred to me personally the last couple of weeks.

On Saturday night, while in Phoenix, Arizona, for the ALA LibLearnX Conference where I gave a well-received presentation the day after, I attended the Suns-Wizards game with 5 other librarians, an ethnically, sexually and age-diverse group of 3 women and 3 men (including myself). However, when we entered the area of the stadium, only I was singled out to go into a special line to be screened, which took an additional five minutes or so - I had to empty my pockets and go through a metal detector, which I passed with flying colors.

At the airport on the way home, I emptied my pockets and went through the metal detector. I was through without ringing and cleared by the security guy, only to be pulled back by a "random" screening. So I went back through the detector I had cleared and to the side. After waiting for a bit, I went through the scanner where you raise your arms and wait 3 seconds. I was cleared again, but then I had to sit in a chair and remove my shoes. My ankles were scanned and inspected, and then my shoes were put through the item scanner again. The old white dude "randomly selected" after me didn't have to sit down or remove his shoes, his ankles were inspected over his shoes, and he was able to get out of that area before me.

The most egregious incident (and most disturbing to me, anyway), didn't occur with an authority figure, or even at a security clearance. It was on the way home from Auckland, New Zealand to New York. I actually got very lucky - American Airlines had overbooked their flights, so I was switched to a non-stop flight on Qantas and was able to get home 7 hours faster, on a better airline with better food and better service, and I didn't have to go through customs in LA and check my bag/go through security again. The only issue was that I was sacrificing two aisle seats for a middle seat on a 15 hour flight, but even that was rectified when an elderly couple from Long Island wanted to sit together and gave me the aisle seat next to them.

The trouble began when I conversed with the couple next to me. I usually do befriend my fellow travelers, and they were a nice and accommodating couple for the most part, traveling with their kids and grandkids (they were paying for a two-week vacation for the entire family to Australia and were transiting through New Zealand) who were sitting in a different part of the plane. But when the couple told me they were "going home," and I happily said I was going home too, there was complete silence and the man started becoming very defensive. "My grandfather was the first person to live in those towers in Fresh Meadows" he said angrily when I mentioned the neighborhood where I lived. We kept conversing though on various topics, and hours later, when I mentioned that I was born at Flushing Hospital, he immediately and aggressively asked, "You were born here or there?" Even though I had already told him. I had to explain to him that my parents immigrated as permanent residents in the 1970s, I was born in the early 80s in NYC, they served NYC for nearly 40 years and I lived my whole life there except college etc. Later, again seemingly perplexed and in disbelief, he asked, "Where did you go to high school?" Then I basically told him my entire schooling (2 hr subway/bus trips through hell etc.) and life story. By the end of the flight, perhaps impressed, he implied I should court his unmarried, similarly-aged daughter, and while she might be very nice, I don't exactly want an ignorant and racist father-in-law like the character in my story "Old Guido" (in Good Americans).

After all, why did I have to explain all this to him? He certainly wouldn't have reacted that way or asked me any of that if I was White. I could have been on a tourist visa or an undocumented immigrant and he wouldn't have questioned anything I had said if I was White. But because I'm Brown, he needed extra convincing that I was Natural Born. Whether that even convinced him that I was "American" is yet another question. We didn't discuss politics - although I did express my dissatisfaction with Congestion Pricing - his position was that it was an obvious money-grab and while he would pay through his teeth because he had to drive into Manhattan twice a week to take his wife to the doctor - she was coughing half the time with a lung condition - he didn't mind because he was rich enough not to care, yet another example that supposedly "progressive" policies like Congestion Pricing just benefit the rich - but either way, I wondered whether his anger was influenced by anti-woke godfather Vivek Ramaswamy's recent comments at the time that were spun by many as implying that Asian-Americans were superior to White Americans. https://x.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/1872312139945234507?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1872312139945234507%7Ctwgr%5E3ae9ed9858039ba3b70a645b1ed1680748b68877%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.usatoday.com%2Fstory%2Fopinion%2Fvoices%2F2025%2F01%2F14%2Fvivek-ramaswamy-tiger-parents-burnout-school%2F77421962007%2F&mx=2

And while I don't like Vivek at all, he basically was making a "Tiger Dad" argument about American parenting culture, not race, that Asians tend to force their kids to be "extraordinary" academically while White parents tend to want their kids to be "well-rounded," focus on sports and therefore are likely to be "ordinary." That's generally true parenting-wise (although not in my case) but it's certainly not true that being a nerd is the only way to be "extraordinary" and how can one even be "extraordinary" if most people aren't "ordinary"? You need both in any society.

So my plane buddy could have been angry about that, I don't know, and especially about the fact that Vivek defended the H1-B Visa because those individuals are coming in based on merit, which Vivek values and believes could happen here too if American parents just kicked enough ass. But that doesn't just apply to Indian nationals - after all, the Danish guy I sat next to for 12 hours in Sydney on New Years Eve while waiting for the fireworks - whip smart as far as I could tell - was also studying software engineering and also desperately wanted an H1B Visa to the USA so he could make a lot more money than in Denmark (so was an Indonesian girl I met later).

Something else that occurred to Vivek Ramaswamy might also be worth mentioning here. It was his interview with Ann Coulter while he was a Presidential candidate, where she began by praising him to the moon (she agreed with pretty much everything he said, more than Donald Trump and any other Republican candidate, she claimed), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SQyWQIE2yU but that she couldn't vote for him because he was "an Indian." Vivek (and Ann) tried to spin this in a later interview by saying that Coulter meant he wasn't Second Generation, as some douchebags, including a Republican African-American friend of mine ("and I'm the black guy saying that," he stated about my potential candidacy), have implied because First Generation Natural Born Americans are too "suspicious" and tied to their parents' countries/cultures (This is not true at all Constitutionally, or Rationally).

However, this is not what Ann Coulter said, nor is it, I think, what she meant. She said it was because Vivek was "an Indian," which would apply even if he was an Eighth Generation American (improbable, but possible, there have been ethnic Indians in what's now the USA since the 1600s). Basically, as my White American plane buddy figured, he and I are "perpetual foreigners," as are all Asian Americans.

Whether this is sentiment prevails among a majority of Americans (or even the half that voted for DT) is more questionable, but it clearly is an issue that persists (the glass ceiling, the fact that we're constantly confused for each other etc.) I recall a statistic when Andrew Yang was running in 2020 that Americans would be more comfortable with a gay white male President than an Asian-American one (though not an Atheist - although curiously it's okay to vote in a twice-impeached insurrectionist, sore loser, traitor, liar, cheater, draft dodger, convicted felon and rapist, and aspirant Dictator).

Indian-American women seem to have a slightly easier time - obviously there's Kamala Harris (lost), Nikki Haley (lost), other Indian American governors and an endless succession of Indian American CEOs, White House-Pentagon department heads and staff, even a Miss America.

Thankfully, I don't plan to run for POTUS anytime soon, which might be for the best because let's face it, a Tejas Desai Independent run will be a 1,000 times crazier than a Donald Trump run, so maybe I will spare the world, or maybe not, it depends how bad things get…

Yet you know I'm going to spin all this towards my new book BAD AMERICANS, which starts to come out in March 2025 and will be published a month apart until April 2026. Because this issue is front and center in several individual stories - particularly "Immigrants Unite!" "Love Liability" and "Cape Conundrum" - as well as the frame story. The first 6 ebooks are ready to go and I'm debating whether to put them as pre-orders or not. But you can start to read about them here, and there will updates soon!

[thenewwei]

ALA LibLearnX in Phoenix—giving a widely-praised presentation on Reinvigorating Green Spaces for Library Services in front of a packed audience—Suns-Wizards game with 5 other librarians (two not pictured)—first ride in a driverless Waymo car, apparently safer than a Lyft that smoked out and left us in the desert—Phoenix Art Museum, Scottsdale Contemporary Museum of Art, my first Cornish pasty, robots reading, other presentations. #library #LibLearnX #ala #conference #Waymo #greenhouse #GreenSpaces #community #gardening #communitygarden #communitygardening #communitygardeners #art #robot #reading #storytelling

[thenewwei]

First The New Wei Collective meeting since my trip. Followed an awesome Combating Racism Series where I led a discussion of indie authors on Confronting Literary Segregation: Supporting Indie Authors in Public Libraries. Will preside over the ESRT meeting tomorrow upstate in West Harrison. Lots of work stuff and then leading Reinvigorating Green Spaces for Library Services at ALA LibLearnX in Phoenix, Arizona next weekend. Packed doings after the trip. Pictured: New Wei member Vegas K Jarrow revealing his New Wei t-shirt like he’s Superman (son of Subraman)! #author #authors #authorcommunity #authorssupportingauthors #libraries #IndieAuthor #segregation #literaryfiction #literary #literature #literarysegregation #Diversity #diversityandinclusion #diversitymatters #superman

[thenewwei]

My Indian/Australian Adventure

Please note that most essays, thoughts, videos and pictures of my latest month-long trip adventure to India/Singapore/Bali/Australia/New Zealand are not available on Tumblr.

The best bet is to follow me on Facebook, either my personal page: https://www.facebook.com/tejas.desai.1671/ or my author page: https://www.facebook.com/tejasdesaiwriter/

You can also try Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tejasdesaiauthor 

Enjoy…

[thenewwei]

Reflections on India

After taking 11 flights, 2 long-distance buses and much local transport across Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand over a month, I have arrived back in New York City. I have been hibernating for the last week or so, trying to get over jet lag, return to my normal sleep schedule (this has been a woeful disaster), and taking care of family business. Here are some reflections on India ( will get to the other nations in later posts):

India

It is remarkably modern now. For the first time in six visits to India over my life, I did not get sick at all, despite having marked jet lag for the first few days. Granted, I was limited to Surat, self-proclaimed “the cleanest city in India.” Nearly every home had modern seat toilets and bidet shower, the exception being one roadside gas station in Maharashtra on my long road trip in the middle of the night from the Mumbai airport. This was not true at all on my last visit in 2012, although it was rapidly modernizing even then. Also, next to my uncle’s home in a relatively posh neighborhood of Surat (well, it was a barren dirt field when his father bought it in the early 1970s), you would see people driving bullock carts in 2012. Not anymore, now there’s a modern “Northern Boulevard” type street right next door with multiple lanes.

The wedding was spectacular. My extended family (which, in India, includes people who aren’t directly related to you and even neighbors) were amazingly welcoming and accommodating. Everyone helped out. The locations were ornate, the technology used was exquisite. Some people outside of India who viewed my online documentary on the wedding told me they assumed that the couple getting married was from outside India (because how could they afford just a luxurious wedding) but both families are from Surat. I’m not even sure they’ve ever left India.

And this is the general sentiment I got from people in India that they want foreigners to take with them. One told me it will be the same here as in the West “in five years” (not so sure—maybe 10-15?). One of my uncles told me Indians don’t want their nation to be considered like the world depicted in “Slumdog Millionaire.” I mean “Slumdog Millionaire” (a British film) was from 2008, which was 16 years ago, and it’s a rag to riches story that could easily happen in any nation, including, maybe especially, in the United States, but no matter. They associate it with Western propaganda (because of course films are made just to insult nations) that their nation is poor and filthy.

The main reason India has prospered, especially economically and technologically, seems to be help from Russia. And pretty much everyone I met had a pro-Russia, pro-Putin, pro-Modi and pro-Trump mentally. All the right wing talking points were there: George Soros funded the riots that led the CIA to ouster the Bangladeshi PM because the USA wants some island (not Greenland :) —don’t remember the last time the USA conquered a territory to keep it, and the only person in this century who’s ever hinted at this is, recently, Trump); the US “provoked” Russia into invading Ukraine after installing Zelensky after the Revolution of Dignity in 2019 (problem—the Revolution of Dignity occurred in 2014 (before which there was a decades-long and popular effort to have closer ties to the West) and, there was a previously pro-Western President before Zelensky who was elected in 2014 (after the popular overthrow of the pro-Russian President) and Zelensky was popularly elected in a landslide in 2019, but I guess that doesn’t jive with the info on Russian State TV); Bush attacked Iraq in 2003 to install a pro-US govt (true, at the time—not as much anymore) and steal their oil (evidence?); Trump will bring “peace on Earth” by reeling in the violent, stubborn and insubordinate Zelensky, by stopping the CIA/Military etc. from unnecessary meddling in world affairs and by punishing China and Muslims everywhere; the USA and UK only have good economies because they control the gold/monetary supply—etc. etc. Needless to say, being “Good for India” meaning economically and for Hindus/Modi/BJP is the barometer and only barometer for what should go on in India.

Only after I got back did my mother tell me that a couple of family members had expressed different (pro-Congress) points of view to her in the past. But I didn’t hear them while in India. As far as I can tell, at least among high caste Gujaratis, India under Modi is ideologically totalitarian. I suppose that’s not surprising considering that India is a developing rather than developed nation and that, despite having the world’s largest democracy by population, India had no history of democracy before 1947 (unless you count ancient Dwarka under Krishna’s guidance in the Hindu epics and who knows if that even existed). And I experienced plenty of high caste Indians ordering around restaurant workers, servants, even their wives, in a way no one could ever get away with in America.

One of my uncles told me that the diversity of political thought in America had gone way downhill. Really? I mean, just for one example, 16 Democrats ran for the Presidential nomination in 2020, each with various ideas for issues and governance. And the only reason we didn’t get the same in 2024 was an incumbent President who bowed out too late and picked his VP to run in his place like 100 days before the election because the party didn’t want to go into the election divided. On the Republican side we had serious challenges to Trump by Nikki Haley, and there were some fresh ideas offered, whether people liked them or not. It’s true, there are ridiculous hurdles to running as an Indie candidate but we still had Green, Libertarian, Cornell West, even an Indian American right-wing dude who wasn’t natural-born (I think he was ultimately disqualified--didn't appear on my ballot). I mean everyone has an opinion about everything and even despite the crazy bipartisan divide, there’s still plenty of complex thought among specific issues by Americans of all types. Not to mention hundreds of types of cereals, a million channels, thousands of ethnicities (even languages, in NYC, anyway). One of my cousins also told me that she heard NYC was “dirty.” I admitted it had gone downhill after the pandemic due to idiotic policies and governance, but it’s still NYC. And she lives in Surat (sorry, not as clean or modern as NYC yet—though I didn’t say that).

Speaking of which, there are signs of Modi's lax environmental standards to boost technological innovation. Just take a drive through Vapi, Gujarat. You'll barely be able to see, let alone breathe.

I also watched a film (almost 4 hrs in length with previews and intermission) in a theater in Surat. It was Pushpa 2: The Rule.” The theater had modern recliner seats and waiter service, just like at Alamo Drafthouse or most non-indie theaters in NYC nowadays. Although my relative who (now) lives in Kentucky acted like this was an advance from the US. Maybe these kinds of theaters don’t exist in Kentucky, I don’t know, or maybe he was just trying to show as usual how modern India has become.

The film is a sequel, so I read up on the original prior to watching the film. It was in Hindi without subtitles so I couldn’t understand what was being said, but I got the basic gist. Basically Pushpa is a South Indian gangster who “made it” in the first film, and now needs to maintain/increase his power by controlling politicians. Throughout the first half of the film, he and his selected politician are trying to get on the ballot/influence power, and meanwhile he needs to get a shipment of illegal red tree logs through multiple jurisdictions while being chased by a rogue cop who was humiliated by Pushpa in the last film. I think you can guess who wins that battle.

There was an intermission, after which the film took a completely different turn. Now Pushpa needed to defend Hindu/Indian Womanhood (“whether they like it or not,” as Trump said). While attending a festival, he encounters a cross-dressing, makeup wearing villain (of course the villain must be portrayed as a transgender weirdo in Modi’s anti-woke India) who tries to accost/rape a Hindu virgin. Pushpa intervenes but is summarily dressed down by the victim’s infuriated father. My assumption was that he blamed his daughter for the flirtation in the typical macho manner, but my relative explained to me that his ego was too big and he wanted to be the one to protect her, not Pushpa. Because he’s responsible for her virginity until she’s married. I think.

In any case, Pushpa backs off. We learn the perpetrator is the nephew of the powerful politician Pushpa unsuccessfully courted in the first half of the film and that he has been let off the hook/released from jail on multiple crimes due to this influence. Which gives the cross-dressing villain the chutzpah to kidnap the girl (who’s POV we never get). Now Pushpa goes into Superman mode and tries to save the girl, and after much travail, succeeds and kills the villain. Afterwards, he receives a visit from the tearful father, who apologizes for his ego/arrogance and gives Pushpa’s dutiful/beautiful wife a wedding invitation to the saved daughter’s wedding (assumably an arranged match in the typical Indian manner, although it’s not so typical in India anymore). We learn that the invitation doesn’t include a child that Pushpa’s wife bears.

However, there are unhealthy tidings. The politician is furious at his nephew’s death and swears revenge with the help of the rogue cop. So this is will set the stage for Pushpa 3: The Rampage. Yay!

My relative said the film was “okay” but he praised its positive depiction of Hinduism. He said this was only because the film was South Indian. He claims that Bollywood films depict Hinduism as being evil and Islam as the ideal. An example he gave was that Hindu priests are depicted as rapists, whereas no film would ever depict a Muslim Imam that way. Certainly if true this is an unbalanced depiction.

In any case, I was informed that this film has generally gotten good reviews in India, though I’m not sure why. It’s two completely different storylines, neither of which have a hint of originality. I love crime films, but Pushpa 2 was only semi-interesting for its strange bend.

A word about the traffic in Surat: it’s an amazing experience to be on the road here. There are few traffic lights to speak of, and everyone is basically turning into oncoming traffic that’s head on. You not only have to be a great driver yourself, but you have to trust that everyone else is a great driver too. It’s amazing there aren’t more accidents. Granted, there’s still prohibition in Gujarat, so I imagine drunk driving isn’t so common. Most people who drink are lower caste Hindus in the villages heady on moonshine, like in a Faulkner novel.

I have plenty of other observations but don’t want to make this tremendously long—maybe save it for the book. Even the visa process was painless and featured good eye candy—nothing like the bribery-filled, bureaucratic old days. Bottom line, India has advanced significantly, despite its flaws—so visit if you can!

[thenewwei]

Agree with the article wholeheartedly but the small presses are still following the same basic model and so they can’t by nature produce dynamic work either (if this is what we mean by “literary”—I think this definition has to be tested as well, for I don’t even think Balzac (reading Lost Illusions—he absolutely rips apart the literary world of his day) or Dostoyevsky would be considered literary under the current agent definition). For example I am publishing my latest book Bad Americans, a frame novel filled with 12 long stories set during the Covid Pandemic (think The Decameron meets The Bachelor meets Big Brother meets Upstairs Downstairs) through my own company by publishing each story as a kindle ebook a month apart and the massive book as two parts. That’s 18 publications (including pbk/hardcovers) a month each for a year and a half (all thoroughly beta read, copy edited/ proofread etc.).

Would any “publisher” have the courage or even put out the resources to do this? Bad Americans was dismissed over the last year by both major publishers and small publishers despite its quality being upheld by beta readers—but it’s impossible to market in their eyes due to each story having a different subject and style, or so I assume because no one in this industry ever tells the truth. Not to mention its length and complexity, despite being easy to read.

Point is, if I’m not a rich person and I have the ability to professionally release this massive work myself in such a way, why can’t they? I’m sure there are authors nurtured by the Big Five (I know them, of course) and small publishers but I’m not one of them and likely never will be. Five books self-published, having won multiple awards and several more on the way. Is there even a point in submitting or sending queries anymore? Indie authors need to fend for ourselves and help each other out by former Author Collectives. There seems to be no other choice if we want to release our dynamic fiction without waiting for 20 years for publishers to come around!

[thenewwei]

I say BAD AMERICANS is of the People, for the People and for the People because it features a diversity of voices and experiences: cultural, religious, political, professional etc. Both the frame story and internal stories are populated by a remarkably diverse selection of complex, realistic characters with a variety of experiences: and almost certainly, depending on where you’re coming from, you’ll be challenged or offended in some way by some story, character or viewpoint.

When I started writing Bad Americans full force during the pandemic in 2020, I did not even think about AI, but now that I consider it, it is almost the perfect anti-AI book. For one thing, it is deliberately asymmetrical: some stories are long, some are short, some are in the middle. We have short stories, long stories, novelettes and novellas. We have spoken word, gangsta rap, first person confessionals, even a double story. Have some bot try to rewrite this and I’m certain it would fail. BAD AMERICANS defies formula.

You’ll be introduced to the complex characters in the frame narrative, and the particular characters in the internal stories, as the book is released in parts starting March 2025. I hope you will consider buying some of the stories, trying them out, then buying the whole books if you’re intrigued. I guarantee you, you won’t regret it!

(First Story, “On the Frontlines” is out March 15, 2025–I’ll let you know when the pre-order is ready!)

[thenewwei]

Happy New Year everyone! Enjoy the fireworks from Sydney, Australia! I feel 2025 will be a pivotal year for me. I’m finally releasing my magnum opus Bad Americans, a book by the People, of the People, and for the People, in one of the most ambitious publishing campaigns in literary history, with 16 publications across the next year and a half. The New Wei will continue to grow. We’ve reached the Twilight of the Publishers and their inability to release dynamic fiction like The Human Tragedy will simply embolden the rise of literary movements and author collectives like this one, changing the literary landscape and culture forever. I will be doing author events during this period and other lectures throughout the country, including at NYLA’s Combatting Racism Series online and in Phoenix at ALA LibLearnX in late January. Nothing will stop the rise of Great Narrative! Happy New Year! #newyear2025 #literaryfiction #literature #greatness #sydneyaustralia #australia #thenewwei #thehumantragedy #author #authors #writer #writers #literarymovements #ambition #books #bookstagram #book #BookSeries #LiteraryCulture

[thenewwei]

Brief stopover in Kuwait City. I’ve been in many middle eastern airports so the sights are similar—the sheikhs in long robes and the women in black coverage of various types depending on their religiosity but invariably wearing dirty sneakers, fancy makeup and perfectly manicured nails 🙂 Of course the workers are immigrants of all backgrounds. Should have known security would’ve confiscated my Axe Body Spray at slightly over the legal ounce limit even though US airports including JFK on the way here didn’t care. Also had my iPad smashed by an obnoxious customers’ bag but it seems fine for now. I’ve been reading about Kuwaiti culture a bit and didn’t realize how much the 1990 Iraqi invasion really affected the country’s infrastructure and collective psyche. I was so sleepy (consistently woken up on the plane by my seat-mates), that I initially curled up on two seats but finally found a lounge area with bed-length couches. Downed a cappuccino and Turkey sandwich. Now onto Mumbai! #travelblogger #travelphotography #travel #authors #authorslife #authortravel #kuwaitcity #kuwaitlife #kuwaithistory #kuwaiti #KuwaitInternationalAirport #writersofinstagram #middleeast #arabic #authorsofinstagram

[thenewwei]

I’m about to head on my most ambitious trip to date: first to my second cousin Yasu’s wedding in Surat, India, where I haven’t been since my research trip for The Brotherhood Chronicle 12 years ago. Then onto Singapore, Bali, Australia, New Zealand. It might be too ambitious even for me, but I wanted to take care of it before my year and a half long project to publish my most ambitious book to date, Bad Americans, The Great American Pandemic Novel and anthology sequel to Good Americans). My previous bid to visit Singapore and Bali were thwarted by illness before the Covid Pandemic (turns out that might be what it was—the symptoms matched), and I haven’t been to Australia since 2013 so I want to explore some new places and revisit some old haunts. I’ll be posting as usual throughout my trip. Wish me Bon Voyage! #trip #asiatrip #australia #newzealand #COVID19 #covid #pandemic #adventure #adventuretravel #backpacking #india #surat #suratcity #BadAmericans #GoodAmericans #tejasdesai #authorlife #author #bookstagram #book #books #authortravel #writerslife #writer #writersofinstagram

[thenewwei]

Selected members of the newly formulated The New Wei Author Collective! with Vegas K Jarrow Matthew Allison Ishy Christine Kacper Annette Brown. Missing William J. McGee, Chris Styles Moet and several others! #collective #literarycommunity #salon #author #authorscommunity #authors #books #book #bookstagram

[thenewwei]

Good Americans is free today. Pick up your copy today, in anticipation of Bad Americans!

[thenewwei]

I don't recall if The Brotherhood ever went higher than #50 in the entire Kindle Store. It probably did but don't remember the exact number. Well its sequels are currently at #49 (The Run and Hide) and #51 (The Dance Towards Death) respectively (probably were even higher last night, but I didn't have time to check).

It was certainly nice to see all 3 thrillers on the Amazon best seller list for Asian American Lit and Hardboiled Mysteries. And I definitely bested a personal record with nearly 5,000 downloads in one day. And it's still free today, so if you don't have copies, you still have a shot!

#kindlebooks #KindleUnlimited #ebook #ebookbestseller #ebookdeals #ebooksale #ebooklaunch #books #bookstagram #booktok #booknow #bookrecommendations #booklovers #freebooks #freebies #freeebook #FreeEbookDownload #thriller #thrillerbooks #mystery #mysterybooks #ebookstore #noir #hardboiled #adventure #adventureTravel #action #author #authorsofinstagram #detective

[thenewwei]

We had an awesome Annual Southeast Queens Author Festival! I introduced the innovative rollout of Bad Americans and pumped its predecessor Good Americans. Then 16 diverse & dynamic authors, including William J. McGee, Chris Stylez (Styles Moet), Catherine Manett, Vegas K Jarrow, Jonathan Kravetz, Aida Zilelian-Silak, and many others graced the stage and delivered memorable readings. The place was packed, and everyone gave great reviews. See you next year! #literature #events #books #bookstagram #authorsofinstagram #authorscommunity #bookfestival #BookLovers #indieauthors #nyc #queens #queensny #southeastqueens #cambria #shortstory #storytelling #shortstorycollection #novel #thriller #booktok #authorlife #novels #novelas #BadAmericans #GoodAmericans #thehumantragedy #thenewwei