Border Less
(By Namrata Poddar)
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| Author | Namrata Poddar |
Featured in The Millions’s and Ms. Magazine’s most anticipated books for 2022; Brown Girl Bookshelf's "2022 Books to Read in 2022," BuzzFeed News’s “16 Upcoming Books from Indie Presses You’ll Love,” Aster(ix) Journal's Best Books of 2022, Chicago Review of Books's 2022 list for "Incredible Debuts," Washington Independent Review of Book's Favorites for 2002, and other lists.
Dia Mittal is an airline call centre agent in Mumbai searching for an easier life. As her search takes her to the United States, Dia’s checkered relationship with the American Dream dialogues with the experiences and perspectives of a global South Asian community across the class spectrum--call center agents, travel agents, immigrant maids, fashion designers, blue- and white-collar workers in the hospitality industry, junior and senior artists in Bollywood, hustling single mothers, academics, tourists in the Third World, refugees displaced by military superpowers, Marwari merchants and trade caravans of the Silk Road, among others. What connects the novel’s web of brown border-crossing characters is their quest for belonging and negotiation of power struggles, mediated by race, class, gender, nationality, age, or place. With its fragmented form, staccato rhythm, repetition, and play with English language, Border Less questions the “mainstream” Western novel and its assumptions of good storytelling.
Chapters from the novel won the Short Story Contest organized by 14th International Conference on the Short Story in English, judged by Bharati Mukherjee and Clark Blaise; the New Asian Writing Prize; and appeared in The Best Asian Short Stories anthology. The opening chapter, in a slightly different form, was published in The Kenyon Review.
"An excellent, exciting debut, a novel that is not afraid to go into dangerous spaces and ask difficult questions. Border Less reimagines the experience of migration in powerful, surprising and memorable ways." —Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, American Book Award winner and Author of The Last Queen
“Irreverent… portrait of adventures and hardships in a racialized, Brown body.” —Morgan Jerkins, New York Times Bestselling Author of This Will Be My Undoing
“Not only does this resonant feminist debut challenge normative narratives of immigrant life, it also disrupts the notion of the Western novel in form and function.” —Karla J. Strand, Ms. Magazine
“Namrata Poddar…has created an engaging debut by bringing us into the lives of those who leave and those who stay. If she is tilling familiar ground, she is also giving us a new set of characters. That the individual stories in Border Less can stand on their own is testament to her literary dexterity.” —Martha Anne Toll, NPR
“In its tangle of “Roots” and “Routes” — its complementary halves — Poddar’s debut sheds light on the inextricable networks that make up cosmopolitan India, its California spinoffs and the cyclical, multigenerational journey from there to here and back again.” –Meena Venkataramanan, The Los Angeles Times
“The insights of Indian American diasporic experiences — where the borders of internalized colonialism and patriarchy are crossed and reinforced both ways — gives Poddar’s literary effort its strength.” — Gabriel San Román, The Los Angeles Times: Times OC
“Namrata Poddar is a fierce storyteller, and Border Less has a lively, singular cast of characters that burn in the memory." —Angie Cruz, Author of Dominicana, and Editor-in-chief of Aster(ix)
“Delves with heart-breaking delicacy and precision into the solitary struggles of her characters, whether in the teeming, sweat-drenched Mumbai metropolis or on sunny Californian shores: through the tiny, yet deep epiphanies that close each chapter of their lives, she shows us how every woman is borderless.” —Ananda Devi, Author of Eve Out of Her Ruins, Winner of the Prix des cinq continents de la francophonie
“Pitch perfect and beautifully written, this debut novel of dislocation, belonging and return captures with acuity and a light touch our shared transnational present and complex human ties.” —Dr. Françoise Lionnet, Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, and Author of Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity
“Eschews mainstream literary convention to stand proudly as a work that makes its own rules.” —Alice Stephens, Washington Independent Review of Books
“Illuminating debut…connecting the fragmented narrative with sharp prose. The range of perspectives harnessed announces Poddar as an exciting new voice in immigrant fiction.” —Publishers Weekly”
