Edison

$29.95

Edison is a Bollywood-style epic tale brimming with song and dance, action and comedy, love and pathos, action and comedy, and cameos by real Indian starts of yesterday and today—a hilariously entertaining masala film in the guise of literary fiction. Along the way, we glean bits of Bollywood history and fall in love with an improbable cast of characters who inhabit Edison’s Little India. Edison is a wild, romantic, laugh-out-loud love letter to life, community, friendship, and the Indian American community of Edison, New Jersey, where debut author Pallavi Dixit grew up.

The unlikely star of Edison is Prem Kumar, the hapless youngest son of a titan of New Delhi industry. Obsessed with Hindi movies—what the world calls Bollywood—he is uninterested in joining the family business or marrying the spear-wielding heiress chosen by his father. He runs away to chase his filmmaking dreams in America, but his plans are immediately derailed. Instead, he finds himself crashing on a mattress and working at an Exxon gas station in the Indian immigrant community of Edison, New Jersey.

Though life is not going according to script, Prem finds a happy rhythm in this bewildering setting. When the beautiful and ambitious Leena Engineer bursts onto the scene, she and her grocery store–owning father upend Prem’s short-term plan to do as little as possible, launching him on an epic adventure to make something of himself. Supported by an unruly cast of roommates, aunties, murderous yet orderly mobsters, and film stars at once glamorous and ludicrous, Prem test-drives the role of hero, and along the way, he witnesses around him the transformation of an ordinary suburb into a bustling “Little India.”

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“A sparkling epic worthy of Bollywood’s silver screens.”

—Kirkus Reviews

Pallavi Sharma Dixit

Pallavi Sharma Dixit holds a BA and an MA (history) from the University of Pennsylvania and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and others. She was a winner of the Asian American Writers Workshop's Pages in Progress Prize and one of three winners of the First Pages Prize in fiction for Edison, her debut novel. She has taught creative writing at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, where she lives with her husband, two children, and their dog. She grew up in Edison and frequently visits the town, where her parents still reside.

“A delightful and perceptive jaunt into the heart of the Indian American community of New Jersey, Edison is a charming, often hilarious novel brimming over with life, laughter, and dreams.”

—Chitra Divakaruni, author of Independence and Mistress of Spices

“Pallavi Sharma Dixit has given us an unforgettable love story, a riotous comedy, a tender coming-of-age tale, a history of an American city, and an homage to Indian cinema, told with all the romance and drama and verve of the movies.”

—Nathan Hill, NY Times bestselling author of Wellness (Oprah’s Book Club)

"In this effervescent debut . . . a large cast of endearing characters, including Prem’s roommates and the Bollywood performers he recruits, round out the story, which is enlivened by Dixit’s natural gift for screwball comedy. This romp is one to savor."

—Publisher’s Weekly