Overview

Summer 2020: the Covid-19 Pandemic is raging. A reclusive billionaire, Olive Mixer, calls twelve diverse & lonely Americans to his mansion complex in the Hamptons: nurses, lawyers, mechanics, social workers, students, financial analysts, soldiers, Uber drivers, engineers, hair salon operators. During the day, the guests meet, compete, date, dine, flirt and fight. Each night, one must tell the group a story. Their tales range widely in subject, style, length and decorum. Many stories respond to each other. They trigger passionate debate and fiery resistance. They change how characters perceive each other and affect the trajectory of the frame narrative. They make us ponder the nature of storytelling itself. Bad Americans is part Boccaccio and part The Bachelor, but it is a creation all its own. Both a novel and short story collection, Bad Americans is at once a powerful portrait of the American pandemic experience and an examination of narrative itself. Bad Americans: Part Iincludes the frame narrative and the first six stories. Bad Americans: Part II will conclude the frame narrative and include six additional stories. These two books are the second and third volumes of the profound and daring anthology series The Human Tragedy, following the subversive classic Good Americans.

Full Product Details

9781734727852

Table of Contents

Reviews

""A wide-ranging, consistently surprising novel-in-stories...A layered, one-of-a-kind experience, highlighting not just human nature but the fault lines that appear when people from different walks of life converge."" -- BookLife Reviews, Publishers Weekly ""Memorable...A diverse collection of tales that skillfully illustrate various facets of modern life."" -- Kirkus Reviews ""Tejas Desai's contemporary masterpiece of social inspection and literary achievement is highly recommended for readers...prompting discourses on social issues, Bad Americans: Part II is a strong study in violence, redemption, and repression that lingers in the mind long after the stories unfold."" -- D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review ""Tejas Desai serves up a masterclass in moral complexity in Bad Americans: Part II, the second half of his audacious literary experiment that marries the design of Boccaccio to the sensibility of Balzac, crafting a fever-dream of storytelling that is at once scathing social commentary and compassionate human chronicle. Set in a nation quarantined by fear, ideology, and longing, Desai blends satire and moral inquiry in creating a crucible to test the souls of his characters and, by extension, his readers. The result is dazzlingly complex, darkly funny, and deeply engaging-a mirror held to America in a time of turmoil. A daring and essential work of fiction."" -- Jacob M. Appel, author of Shaving with Occam ""Each story remains intriguing on its own, each told with a unique voice. And each acts like a rock thrown into a pond, sending out ripples through the listeners, lifting some, dunking others, and always starting disagreements, discussions, and more than one argument...Everyone will find someone to cheer for, someone to hold as a villain, and even more, to begin to see them both as the flawed human beings they are."" -- W. Lance Hunt, author of A Perfect Blindness

Author Information

Tejas Desai is the author of the Amazon #1 bestselling international crime trilogy The Brotherhood Chronicle (2018-2020), which has won 17 literary honors and has been praised as ""awe-inspiring,"" ""breathtaking,"" ""riveting"" and ""a must read that will keep you guessing."" His panoramic portrait of American society, The Human Tragedy, includes the award-winning Good Americans (2013), which was praised by Kirkus Reviews as ""a solid collection of rare caliber"" that ""speaks volumes about the human condition and modern life in America,"" and the groundbreaking pandemic novel with short stories Bad Americans, which is being released in Parts throughout 2025 and 2026. The founder of The New Wei Literary Arts Collective & Movement, he has been profiled by numerous publications including HuffPost, Buzzfeed and The London Post. He attended Wesleyan University, University of Oxford and holds two Masters degrees, including a MFA in Creative Writing, from CUNY-Queens College. He was born, lives and writes in New York City, where he works as a supervising librarian for Queens Public Library.

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