Join us and the RISD Literary Arts and Studies Department in welcoming Jai Chakrabarti for a reading from his new short story collection, A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness: Stories. Joining him in conversation will be Sara Majka, author of Cities I’ve Never Lived In.

ABOUT A SMALL SACRIFICE FOR AN ENORMOUS HAPPINESS

In the fourteen masterful stories that make up this collection, Jai Chakrabarti crosses continents and cultures to explore what it means to cultivate a family today, across borders, religions, and race.

In the title story, a closeted gay man in 1980s Kolkata seeks to have a child with his lover’s wife. An Indian widow, engaged to a Jewish man, struggles to balance her cultural identity with the rituals and traditions of her newfound family. An American musician travels to see his guru for the final time—and makes a promise he cannot keep. A young woman from an Indian village arrives in Brooklyn to care for the toddler of a biracial couple. And a mystical agent is sent by a mother to solve her son’s domestic problems.

Throughout, the characters’ most vulnerable desires shape life-altering decisions as they seek to balance their needs against those of the people they hold closest. The stories in A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness capture men and women struggling with transformation and familial bonds; they traverse the intersections of countries and cultures to illuminate what it means to love in uncertain times; and they showcase the skill of a storyteller who dazzles with the breadth of his vision.

ABOUT JAI CHAKRABARTI

O. Henry and Pushcart Prize winner Jai Chakrabarti is the author of the novel A Play for the End of the World (Knopf ’21), which won the National Jewish Book Award for debut fiction, was the Association of Jewish Libraries Honor Book, was short-listed for the Rabindranath Tagore Prize, and was long-listed for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He is also the author of the story collection A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness (Knopf ’23), which was a Good Housekeeping Book of the Month and was recommended by the New Yorker and the NYTimes. His short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Ploughshares, One Story, Electric Literature, A Public Space, Conjunctions, and elsewhere and also performed on Selected Shorts by Symphony Space. His nonfiction has been published widely in such journals as The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Writer’s Digest, Berfrois, and LitHub. He was an Emerging Writer Fellow with A Public Space and received an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College and is a trained computer scientist. Born in Kolkata, India, he now lives in New York with his family.

ABOUT SARA MAJKA

Sara Majka is the author of the story collection Cities I've Never Lived In, which was published by Graywolf Press / A Public Space Books. She teaches in the Department of Literary Arts and Studies at RISD.