Sameer Pandya - Our Beautiful Boys (Pt 2)

Thursday, May 22 at 2:30 PM on KPFK, I air part two of a two-part show featuring novelist and short story writer Sameer Pandya on his newest novel, Our Beautiful Boys. It is receiving enthusiastic reviews as well as both popular and critical attention. Pandya’s cultural criticism has appeared widely, including in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Atlantic, Salon, and Sports Illustrated. Our Beautiful Boys is a simultaneously insightful sociological study and tantalizing mystery story set in an affluent community where football, family, social media, status, ethnicity, teenage jargon and identity offer clues meant to explore conflict and consider ethical behavior, easy expectations and difficult, complicated realities. With humor and empathy, and sharp insights into class and culture, Our Beautiful Boys is an unsparing if also empathetic study of aspiration, hypocrisy, and the struggles which some adults seem to pass on to their children. In this part we begin with discussion of a novel which informed Pandya’s own life and appears in Our Beautiful Boys, the classic A Separate Peace by John Knowles.

Thanks for listening to Bibliocracy on the radio, online, or at the BibliocracyRadio.org website. Please donate to KPFK. Call the station at (818) 985-5735 (818) 985-KPFK, or go online to kpfk.org.

Thanks to the Community of Writers for production help, and for hosting Bibliocracy Radio as a podcast. For more on the Community of Writers, please visit its website: https://communityofwriters.org/