Optional Practical Training - by Shubha Sunder (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

An elegantly inventive debut novel that offers a sharp new take on the immigrant story in post-9/11 America

Told as a series of conversations, Optional Practical Training follows Pavitra, a young Indian woman who came to the US for college from Bangalore, India, and graduates in 2006 with a degree in physics. Her student visa grants her an extra twelve months in the country for work experience--a period known as Optional Practical Training--so she takes a position as a math and physics teacher at a private high school near Cambridge, Massachusetts.

What Pavitra really wants, though, is the time and space to finish a novel--to diverge from what's expected of her within her family of white-collar professionals and to build a life as a writer. Navigating her year of OPT--looking for a room to rent, starting her job--she finds that each person she encounters expects something from her too. As her landlord, colleagues, students, parents of her students, friends of her family, and neighbors talk to and at her, they shape her understanding of race, immigration, privilege, and herself.

Throughout the book, Pavitra seems to speak very rarely; and yet, as she responds to the assumptions, insights, projections, and observations of those around her, a subtle and sophisticated portrait emerges of a young woman and aspiring artist defining a place for herself in the world.

Review Quotes

"On the surface, Optional Practical Training is about the initial phase that many educated American immigrants go through nowadays, but at heart it is about how migrations change one from within and without. This story, fundamentally American as well as universal, is told in supple prose, with ease and grace, and gives a great deal of pleasure and insight."--Ha Jin, National Book Award winner and author of The Woman Back from Moscow

"Shubha Sunder's voice and storytelling are a delight--wry, poignant, and effortlessly engaging. Here is a fresh exploration of the cross-cultural experience. A timely and insightful novel that demands our attention."--Weike Wang, author of Rental House

"Optional Practical Training is a knockout wonder. Shubha Sunder has created a rich and blazingly layered portrait of a young woman named Pavitra, who is fighting to not only be an artist, but fighting to discover a true sense of herself in a world that has so many ideas about how her life should be. This is a beautiful, and beautifully intimate, quest of a book--one where you will find yourself cheering for Pavitra very, very loudly--and I loved every page of it."--Paul Yoon, author of The Hive and the Honey

"Gloriously inquisitive about an immigrant's peculiar position, at times delightfully combative, at other times wrenchingly gentle, Optional Practical Training is a novel that is always true to itself."--Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning

"Optional Practical Training is as sharp, bright, and subtle as a blade hidden up a sleeve. Before you know it, it has sliced clear through the ether of absurdity that is immigrant life."--Namwali Serpell, author of The Furrows

"Quietly subversive, this is an immigration narrative to undermine the various reductionist immigration narratives of our moment."--Jonathan Frey, The Millions

"The forty-some impressions illustrate an extraordinary breadth of human experience, both containing and defying stereotype--ensuring each chapter is weighted with the same messy complexity as a day in the real world."--Asya Partan, The Rumpus

"Reminiscent of both Rachel Cusk and Elif Batuman (two writers I love), this sharp story did exactly what I'd hoped--reminded why I love reading again."--Taylor Eisenhauer, Condé Nast Traveler

About the Author