Liquid

The Marriage Plot meets The Idiot in this brilliant debut, which tells the story of a young Muslim scholar stuck in the mire of adjunct professorship in Los Angeles who decides to give up her career in academia & marry rich, committing herself to 100 dates in the course of a single summer. By midsummer reality hits, taking her—and her project—to Tehran. The unnamed Iranian-Indian American narrator of Liquid has always believed herself to be the smartest person in the room. And from an early age, she & her best friend—a poet-turned-marketer named Adam—have turned their noses up at other peoples’ riches. But 2 years after earning a PhD from UCLA, the narrator is no closer to the middle-class comfort promised to her by the prestige of her fancy, scholarship-funded education & the successes of her immigrant parents. Jokingly, Adam suggests she just “marry rich.” But our protagonist, whose PhD thesis compared Eastern & Western views of marriage in film & literature, takes the idea seriously. She makes a spreadsheet & outlines a goal: 100 dates with people of all genders & a marriage proposal in hand by the official start of the fall semester. What follows is a whirlwind summer packed with dating: martinis sans vermouth with the lazy scion of an Eastside construction empire; board games with a butch producer who owns a house in the hills & a newly dented Porsche; a Venmo request from a “socialist” trust fund babe; & an evening spent dodging the halitosis of a maxillofacial surgeon from Orange County.Only a tragedy in Tehran & an overdue familial reckoning can alter the narrator’s increasingly manic trajectory & force her to confront the contradictions of her life in L.A. And as doubts begin to creep in about her marriage project, it suddenly seems possible that the eligible prospect she’s been looking for has been beneath her nose the entire time.For fans of Kaveh Akbar & Elif Batuman, Liquid delivers a modern tale of romance, loss, & Belonging like no other. The Marriage Plot meets The Idiot in this brilliant debut, which tells the story of a young Muslim scholar stuck in the mire of adjunct professorship in Los Angeles who decides to give up her career in academia and marry rich, committing herself to 100 dates in the course of a single summer. By midsummer reality hits, taking her—and her project—to Tehran. The unnamed Iranian-Indian American narrator of Liquid has always believed herself to be the smartest person in the room. And from an early age, she and her best friend—a poet-turned-marketer named Adam—have turned their noses up at other peoples’ riches. But two years after earning a PhD from UCLA, the narrator is no closer to the middle-class comfort promised to her by the prestige of her fancy, scholarship-funded education and the successes of her immigrant parents. Jokingly, Adam suggests she just "marry rich." But our protagonist, whose...