Feminist Press/Amethyst Editions; Publication Date: May 28, 2024
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. As her pretensions to cynicism and control start to fade, she develops a Gatsby-esque 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.
Naomi Kanakia is the author of four novels, including We Are Totally Normal, Enter Title Here, and Just Happy to Be Here, and The Default World. She is also the author of 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, Lightspeed, Indiana Review, and others.
Naomi has an MFA from Johns Hopkins, and she has received fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Lambda Literary Foundation. Originally from Washington, D.C., Naomi now lives in San Francisco with her wife and daughter.
Additional Praise for THE DEFAULT WORLD:
“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
"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
“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 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
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