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2 weeks ago | 
scroll.in | Sanjena Sathian
The first time I saw Killian, he was nude. Pale, toned, illumined by an unflattering cone of yellow lighting, like Michelangelo’s David on display in a Walmart. I was in my first year of graduate school, attending something called a Naked Supper Club at the home of a forestry school student named Elsa, who hosted monthly dinners consisting entirely of foraged vegetables, roots, and fungi.
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2 weeks ago | 
shethepeople.tv | Sanjena Sathian
Sanjana Satyananda is trying to recover her life. It’s been a year since she walked out on her husband, a struggling actor named Killian, at a commune in India, after a disagreement about whether to have children. Now, Sanjana is struggling to resurrect her busted anthropology dissertation and crashing at her annoyingly perfect sister’s while her well-adjusted peers obsess over marriages, mortgages, and motherhood. Sanjana needs to move forward—and finalize her divorce, ASAP.
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2 months ago | 
penguinrandomhouselibrary.com | Sharnell Johnson |Sanjena Sathian
By Sharnell Johnson | March 28 2025 | NewsFridayReads Have you read this yet? Reading this right now?
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2 months ago | 
bookreporter.com | Sanjena Sathian
Following 2021’s GOLD DIGGERS, Sanjena Sathian’s second novel opens with its protagonist, Sanjana Satyananda, in a state of in-betweenness. Things had fallen apart with her husband, Killian, several months earlier, so Sanjana left Goa and returned to New York City. To save money, she has moved out of her apartment and is caroming between her best friend Lia’s place in Brooklyn and her sister Maneesha’s in New Haven.
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2 months ago | 
news.nestia.com | Sanjena Sathian
We recommend a bounty of good fiction this week, with a collection by Torrey Peters, a mystery by Deanna Raybourn and new novels from Chaim Grade, Karen Russell and others. In nonfiction, we like a journalist’s look back at a little-remembered episode of police brutality from the 1980s and a damning, juicy tell-all by a former Facebook insider. Happy reading.
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2 months ago | 
yahoo.com | Sanjena Sathian
My mother’s name is Usha, and for years, when I told non-South Asian people her name, I’d watch them squint, trying to picture the spelling. But these days, it clicks immediately: Usha, like Usha Chilukuri Vance, the Second Lady of the United States. When people make the connection, I want to add that my family and I have nothing in common with the “Other Usha," the lawyer-turned-enigmatic political wife who stands by her man—the vice president—as he denigrates immigrants and women alike.
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2 months ago | 
lithub.com | Sanjena Sathian
The first stories I ever wrote, in elementary school, were through the eyes of what we once called “tomboys”: short-haired girls who climbed trees and scraped their knees and cantered horses through forests in rainstorms—girls who cried only in private; girls like Jo March and Scout Finch and Pippi Longstocking; girls who resisted their girlhood, or whatever the world told them girlhood was.
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Mar 8, 2025 | 
entertainment-mag.com | Sanjena Sathian
“Goddess Complex”is astute about the repetitiveness of misery, and how pain can accrete like an enclosing wall, rising to block out the rest of the world. As Sanjana’s desperation builds, so do the grievances of those she loves.
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Mar 7, 2025 | 
penguinrandomhouselibrary.com | Maureen Meekins |Sanjena Sathian
Q: Libraries are beloved for their sense of community. Do you remember a time when your library made you feel like a part of something bigger? A: I feel like I was raised by libraries! When I was a kid, my parents took me our local public library branch, marched me up to the front desk, and asked the librarians to help me pick out books because I was tearing through them too quickly for anyone to keep up with recommendations. After that, I always depended on public librarians and school librarians.
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Mar 7, 2025 | 
nytimes.com | Sanjena Sathian
GODDESS COMPLEX, by Sanjena SathianIf you're a woman in America and you don't want children - and if you're honest about this when people ask - then you might be excessively familiar with the common follow-up opinions, questions, warnings. You'll change your mind. What does your partner think? You're wrong. You'll regret it; once you come to your senses, it could be too late. Part of what can be striking about such rebuttals, over time, is how little they vary.
