Bad Americans Review Tour!

Bad Americans: Part 1 by Tejas Desai
Genre: Short stories,,Literary, Satire

Summer 2020: the Covid-19 Pandemic is raging. A reclusive billionaire, Olive Mixer, calls twelve diverse & lonely Americans to his mansion complex in the Hamptons: nurses, lawyers, mechanics, social workers, students, financial analysts, soldiers, Uber drivers, engineers, hair salon operators. During the day, the guests meet, compete, date, dine, flirt and fight. Each night, one must tell the group a story.

Their tales range widely in subject, style, length and decorum. Many stories respond to each other. They trigger passionate debate and fiery resistance. They change how characters perceive each other and affect the trajectory of the frame narrative. They make us ponder the nature of storytelling itself.

Bad Americans is part Boccaccio and part The Bachelor, but it is a creation all its own. Both a novel and short story collection, Bad Americans is at once a powerful portrait of the American pandemic experience and an examination of narrative itself. Bad Americans: Part I includes the frame narrative and the first six stories. Bad Americans: Part II will conclude the frame narrative and include six additional stories.

These two books are the second and third volumes of the profound and daring anthology series The Human Tragedy, following the subversive classic Good Americans.

About Author

Tejas Desai is the author of the Amazon #1 bestselling international crime trilogy The Brotherhood Chronicle (2018-2020), which has won 17 literary honors and has been praised as “awe-inspiring,” “breathtaking,” “riveting” and “a must read that will keep you guessing.” His panoramic portrait of American society, The Human Tragedy, includes the award-winning Good Americans (2013), which was praised by Kirkus Reviews as “a solid collection of rare caliber” that “speaks volumes about the human condition and modern life in America,” and the groundbreaking pandemic novel with short stories Bad Americans, which is being released in Parts throughout 2025 and 2026. The founder of The New Wei Literary Arts Collective & Movement, he has been profiled by numerous publications including HuffPost, Buzzfeed and The London Post. He attended Wesleyan University, University of Oxford and holds two Masters degrees, including a MFA in Creative Writing, from CUNY-Queens College. He was born, lives and writes in New York City, where he works as a supervising librarian for Queens Public Library.

My Thoughts

Bad Americans: Part 1 by Tejas Desai is about the raw experiences of a group of people from all different nationalities & economic backgrounds. After their isolation & negative COVID tests. They were flown in to stay in a mansion owned by Olive Mixer, a millionaire. He had the idea that they would chit-chat & date and live normalish lives during the day. Then at night each person would tell the group a story about an experience in their lives. How graphic they are and who their stories involve depend on their experience. The deep context of how these people experience things very differently based on their race, sexuality, status, etc., is very apparent in how deeply you can feel the pain of the storyteller. This book was not what I was expecting at all. I loved the elaborate spreads of food they had at each meal. dishes from other countries that sounded amazing. This mansion they were staying at had so many activities for these people to do during the day as well.

Very much enjoyed reading others perspectives on things, especially when their stories do not come from people that have never left a small town with no interactions with people from other backgrounds & ablities. People that have experienced racism, sexism, and all the other hateful things that we were supposed to be taught not to inflict upon others. Real, raw, and very much a reflection of the bad American behaviors that so many turn a blind eye to and like to pretend this type of behavior towards others doesn’t exist. Very much looking forward to reading Part 2 of this series….

Links to Bad Americans:

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