Disillusioned with modern romance, globe-trotting Meena tries an arranged marriage with Avi, an aspiring politician in Ohio. But when Avi’s political opponent launches racist attacks, Meena and Avi are forced to defend their immigrant community, which narrowly understands its own traditions, and protect their increasingly shaky relationship. This is an intimate, funny, and heartbreaking novel about small-town America and the politics of marriage.

FOR THE BLESSINGS OF VENUS AND JUPITER by Varun Gauri, a debut novel, is the winner of the 2024 Carol Trawick Fiction Prize from the Washington Writers’ Publishing House.

Varun Gauri was born in India and raised in the American Midwest. After studying philosophy in college and public policy in graduate school, he worked for more than two decades on global poverty and human rights, publishing academic articles and books on development economics and behavioral economics. He now teaches at Princeton University and lives with his family in Bethesda, Maryland. His short fiction was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and recognized in Best American Nonrequired Reading. He was a Summer Writer-in-Residence at Washington, DC’s The Inner Loop. For the Blessings of Jupiter and Venus is his first novel.

Martha Anne Toll is a novelist and literary and cultural critic. Her debut novel, Three Muses, won the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction and was subsequently published by Regal House Publishing (2022). Toll is a recipient of Fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Virginia and the South of France, Monson Arts, and Dairy Hollow. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, and serves on the Board of Directors of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation.

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