Tune in to hear Jai Chakrabarti discuss his debut novel A Play for the End of the World! This is a virtual event please register here
A dazzling debut novel—set in early 1970’s New York and rural India—the story of a turbulent, unlikely romance, a harrowing account of the lasting horrors of the Second World War, and a searing examination of one man’s search for forgiveness and acceptance.
New York City, 1972. Jaryk Smith, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, and Lucy Gardner, a southerner, newly arrived in the city, are in the first bloom of love when they receive word that Jaryk’s oldest friend has died under mysterious circumstances in a rural village in eastern India.
Travelling there alone to collect his friend’s ashes, Jaryk soon finds himself enmeshed in the chaos of local politics and efforts to stage a play in protest against the government—the same play that he performed as a child in Warsaw as an act of resistance against the Nazis. Torn between the survivor’s guilt he has carried for decades and his feelings for Lucy (who, unbeknownst to him, is pregnant with his child), Jaryk must decide how to honor both the past and the present, and how to accept a happiness he is not sure he deserves.
An unforgettable love story, a provocative exploration of the role of art in times of political upheaval, and a deeply moving reminder of the power of the past to shape the present, A Play for the End of the World is a remarkable debut from an exciting new voice in fiction.
About the Author:
JAI CHAKRABARTI’s short fiction has appeared in numerous journals and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Short Stories, and awarded a Pushcart Prize. Chakrabarti was an Emerging Writer Fellow with A Public Space and received his MFA from Brooklyn College. He was born in Kolkata, India, and now lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his family. A Play for the End of the World is his first novel.
About the Moderator:
Carolyn Ferrell is the author of the novel Dear Miss Metropolitan (Holt, 2021) and the short-story collection Don’t Erase Me, which was awarded the 1997 Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the John C. Zacharis First Book Award given by Ploughshares, and the Quality Paperback Book Prize for First Fiction.
Ferrell's stories and essays have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2018 and The Best American Short Stories 2020, edited by Roxane Gay and Curtis Sittenfeld, respectively; The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike; Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present, edited by Gloria Naylor; Apple, Tree: Writers on Their Parents, edited by Lise Funderburg; and other places. She is the recipient of grants and awards from the Fulbright Association, the Bronx Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Sarah Lawrence College.