The books shown on the left are by Tejas Desai. Click on the cover to order.

This interview was conducted by Christine Kinori on September 10, 2026.

Christine Kinori:  For first-time readers of Bad Americans: Part II, how would you pitch this unique setup? What can readers expect when they step inside this Hamptons mansion with these twelve strangers?

Tejas Desai:  Readers can immerse themselves in a lush setting filled with an entertaining collection of colorful characters who are funny, exciting and get into all kinds of unforgettable shenanigans. But the main event are the vivid stories told by these diverse people, which create worlds within worlds and give you a deeper understanding of them. It’s like having a layered cake and every time you slice into it, you find more flavors inside.

Christine Kinori:  Reviewers have described the book as both a darkly funny social satire and an intense psychological pressure cooker. How do you find that perfect, delicate balance between sharp comedy and high-stakes social tension?

Tejas Desai:  Bad Americans was planned from the beginning to be a masala of narrative effects, and its dynamic structure is a perfect canvas to achieve this goal. But this balance of cutting-edge comedy and thrilling drama are based on the characters’ personalities and backgrounds and the resultant stories they tell, along with their natural interactions with their peers. So, while the structure was planned out to a large extent, the balance in narrative effects took care of itself naturally too.

Christine Kinori:  You have an amazingly diverse cast of characters trapped together. How do you approach character design to ensure that every single voice feels entirely distinct and authentic?

Tejas Desai:  The frame characters just came out of me. When I started writing the book in 2020, I knew exactly how they behaved, how they sounded, what their internal contradictions were. Still, initially I tried all kinds of conventional storyboards like lists of character wants, diets, what sports they liked etc. But then I realized I was trying too hard. I didn’t have to do all that—I tried to keep them true to themselves and fixed inconsistencies as they came up. It was more of a challenge for their desires to be in the mansion—what they wanted out of the experience, why there were there—to be clear and believable to the reader. I would say that I finally resolved that challenge after successive drafts.

Christine Kinori:  The duology is set against the chaotic, claustrophobic backdrop of a global pandemic lockdown. What do you hope readers feel or reflect on when they revisit that specific, historic moment through the lens of your characters?

Tejas Desai:  It was a special time with a strange set of dualities: people were more isolated than ever, but due to the crisis, they also needed each other more than ever. The divisions within our society were more likely to be magnified, especially online, and particularly political division—but race, gender, sexual orientation—all these things were being debated.

We’ve always had this question of whether America is a salad bowl or a melting pot, and the pandemic just heightened these arguments even further. But those tensions are true today too, so even as you immerse yourself into the historical Covid-19 Pandemic, you can also read it as addressing contemporary concerns too.

Christine Kinori:  Outside of writing, you work as a supervising librarian for the Queens Public Library system, which is located in one of the most ethnically diverse areas on Earth. How did your daily interactions with real communities and diverse voices help you shape the hyper-realistic dialogue that makes this book pop?

Tejas Desai:  My wide variety of experiences, both in Queens and on my travels nationally and abroad, gave me such a broad knowledge of human character, quality and interaction to draw from, so that when it came to creating the characters, they were clear in my head, including their internal contradictions, conflicts, backgrounds and general tensions.

That, of course, includes the way the characters talk, internally and especially to each other. Subject specialists and beta readers also helped fill in gaps, but all the experiences I’ve had and the stories I’ve been told also helped make it easier to imagine such a huge world that touches our own in every way.

Christine Kinori:  Without giving away any spoilers, Part II brings this massive narrative experiment to a definitive close with explosive segments like ‘Dope Double Ditty’. If there is one core message or feeling you want your readers to take away after finishing the final page, what would it be?

Tejas Desai:  I suppose it’s that we all must live on the Earth together, no matter our backgrounds, experiences, or needs at a given time. And understanding where someone else in coming from is often the key in realizing that perhaps one individual isn’t always 100% right. We can disagree on specifics but still compromise where needed and be one Nation and one World.

Christine Kinori:  Looking back at your broader catalog, you published a short story collection titled Good Americans over a decade ago. Now, we have the Bad Americans duology. How has your perspective on what it means to be an ‘American’ evolved over the course of your career?

Tejas Desai:  I would say read the books—if there was a simple answer to that question, I wouldn’t have written well over 1,000 pages about it! I imagine my vision has changed a bit about what it means to be American, how that’s defined and whether any one person can define it, but I think you can get that answer by reading the books!

Christine Kinori:  Many of your long-time fans know you best for The Brotherhood Chronicle, which is a fast-paced, high-stakes international crime thriller series. What structural changes did you have to make when moving away from traditional physical action and noir tropes into a narrative driven by verbal arguments and social claustrophobia?

Tejas Desai:  Every project grows based on what it is intended to be and becomes the best version of itself. The Brotherhood Chronicle was intended to be an Asian American literary thriller series from the beginning, but for a long time I didn’t know how to effectively balance the literary and commercial elements. I eventually chose to make it more ostensibly commercial, with the literary elements more internal.

But really the same thing happened with Bad Americans too. There is plenty of physical action in the internal stories—the struggle was making the frame narrative more literary and not as obviously crafted. At the end of the day, I had to tighten the frame a lot more than I originally intended, but I think that made it a lot more compelling.

Of course, there’s the limitation of the Mansion setting in Bad Americans versus the many exotic international locations in The Brotherhood Chronicle books, but even with the former, I think I imagined the mansion complex very precisely, and I visited the Hamptons multiple times so I tried to make sure the other locations outside the mansion were as realistic-seeming as possible, even though they are imaginatively designed as well. And then, in the internal stories, we go to Barcelona, to Israel and the Middle East, to Germany and all across the United States, so readers can get plenty of lushly described and vividly explored settings in Bad Americans too!

Christine Kinori:  As the founder of The New Wei literary arts movement, you have always advocated for provocative, boundary-pushing fiction that challenges the status quo. How does Bad Americans: Part II deliver on that promise, and how does it challenge mainstream commercial publishing norms?

Tejas Desai:  On the content level, even though it is stuffed with a plethora of opinionated characters, Bad Americans: Part II is a very objective book, in that it doesn’t seek to please readers—the characters are what they are, the stories are what they are, and that’s how they are presented. But at the same time, the characters are so complex, funny, and horrible, their stories so compelling and their conflicts so believable, that the reader is forced to pay attention and care. And that’s what the best books do, whether it’s Lolita, or Light in August, or even The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby. We’ve gotten away from that sensibility of fictional narrative having something to say through content; now it’s all about making readers feel better about themselves, and often literary books will have as little content as possible. So that’s the main way the content pushes boundaries and challenges the norms of publishing today.

Then of course, stylistically there’s the frame-story structure, one that hasn’t been tried in any serious way since The Middle Ages, so yes, that will certainly smash the norm of publishing and literature of our time. Even Pulitzer Prize winning short story collections like A Visit from the Good Squad by Jennifer Egan and Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout were fairly straightforward on a structural level. Plus in the Bad Americans duology, each internal tale has a different subject, length and style, and that’s basically unheard of today.

You would think the major publishing industry would want to publish and acclaim the most original, challenging and complex works, but instead, the exact opposite is true today. So that’s the main challenge of The New Wei literary arts movement—changing a notorious anti-meritocracy into a meritocracy.

Christine Kinori:  Whether you are writing a gritty crime novel or a sharp modern satire, your books consistently feature wonderfully complex, morally grey, or deeply repressed characters. What draws you to characters who aren’t traditional heroes, and why do you think readers find them so compelling to root for?

Tejas Desai:  I’ve always written this way—even my stories from third grade in elementary school had gritty crime plots. I’m helped by the fact that I’m always meeting weird, crazy, angry and repressed people in real life, so they feed into the fictional universe and reinforce the fact that the world is indeed this way if you look past the middle-class niceties. I wish it wasn’t, but it seems it is.

But as I said in the previous answer, I just think the best books and films are filled with people like that—maybe not as many as in Bad Americans, but certainly whether its Joe Christmas in Light in August, or Humbert Humbert in Lolita, or Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull or Daniel Plainview in There Will be Blood, we are often fascinated by dark, tortured characters who fight against the odds and against the demons in themselves. And somehow, we’re drawn to them and even root for them despite our preset inclinations.

Christine Kinori: Thank you, Tejas, for taking the time to do this interview with me!