The Default World
A trans woman sets out to exploit a group of wealthy roommates, only to fall under the spell of their glamorous, hedonistic lifestyle in tech-bubble San Francisco.
Years after fleeing San Francisco and getting sober, Jhanvi has made a life for herself working at a grocery co-op and saving for her surgeries. But when her friend (and sometimes more) Henry mentions that he and his techie festival-goer friends spent $100,000 to transform a warehouse basement into a sex dungeon, Jhanvi starts wondering if there's a way to exploit these gullible idiots. She returns to San Francisco, hatching a plan to marry Henry for his company's generous healthcare benefits.
Jhanvi enters a world of beautiful, decadent fire-eaters and their lavish sex parties. But as her pretensions to cynicism and control start to fade, she develops a Gatsbyesque attraction to these happy young people and their bold claims of unconditional love. But do any of her privileged new friends really like or accept her? Her financial needs expose the limits of a community built on limitless self-expression, and soon she has to choose between doing what's right, and doing what's right for her.
This darkly funny novel skewers privileged leftist millennial tech culture, and asks whether "found family" is just another of the twenty-first century's broken promises.
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NAOMI KANAKIA is the author of three YA novels and a nonfiction book, What's So Great about Great Books. Her stories, poetry, and essays have been published in American Short Fiction, Asimov's, Gulf Coast, LitHub, and others. She has an MFA from Johns Hopkins and received the Lambda Literary Emerging Writers Fellowship in 2016. She lives in San Francisco with her wife and daughter.
"A great setup... Readers will undoubtedly root for Jhanvi as she tries to navigate the complicated relationship dynamics she faces as well as her own feelings of rejection and dismissal by both of the groups she desperately wants to be a part of--the fire-eaters she's infiltrated and the transgender community." --Kirkus Reviews
"The Default World is the best sort of novel, one where you fall in love with every one of the tragic, flawed characters, all of them in the midst of great change. And one which ends, as all novels probably should, with an apocalyptic, disastrous sex party! I loved reading this book not only for its story and characters but because it felt deeply honest to me. I was immersed in its world, and recommend it to everyone." --Matthew Zapruder, author of Story of a Poem"Naomi Kanakia's tour de force novel of a trans adventuress among the tech elite is a beautiful cis nightmare in the mold of Manhunt and Tell Me I'm Worthless, ripping off bandage after bandage around body politics and the belief that money and dreams can reshape how we treat each other. The questions her unforgettable antiheroine Jhanvi asks--and the conversations on friendship and what it asks of us that this sparkling, often brutal book will start--are worth your attention." --Jeanne Thornton, author of Summer Fun"This fierce, fearless, and unflinching novel interrogates who we are and what we want. How do we know who we are among an onslaught of identities? And if we don't know who we are, how can we know what we want? Naomi Kanakia's unexpectedly tender conclusion is that the truth is in kindness, in closeness, in feeling." --Taymour Soomro, author of Other Names for Love"Bananas, grody, uninhibited, histrionic, mortifying, funny, and awful. As a satire of contemporary tech-bro burner hippiedom, it's a riot. As a dissection of what it costs to make it as a trans woman in a dude's world, it's harrowing." --Cat Fitzpatrick, author of The Call-Out
"The Default World is the wild, often hilarious and troubling story of Jhanvi, an angry, witty trans woman who tells it like it is. She's entitled, demanding, outrageous, funny, careening, an extremely entertaining and sometimes horrible person who I can't help loving and rooting for." --Matthew Klam, author of Sam the Cat
"The Default World takes a scalpel to constructed myths of joy, allyship, and solidarity within and surrounding queer communities, exposing with unwavering scrutiny the messy networks of insecurity and vulnerability that hum and throb through trans lives and experiences. A heady mixture of satire, exposé, and hard truth-telling." --Bishakh Som, author of Apsara Engine
