Can I read Optional Practical Training on EtoBox?

Optional Practical Training by Shubha Sunder is a work of fiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is Optional Practical Training about?

An elegantly inventive debut novel that offers a sharp new take on the immigrant story in post-9/11 AmericaTold as a series of conversations, Optional Practical Training follows Pavitra, a young Indian woman who came to the US for college from Bangalore, India, and graduates in 2006 with a degree in physics. Her student visa grants her an extra twelve months in the country for work experience—a period known as Optional Practical Training—so she takes a position as a math and physics teacher at a private high school near Cambridge, Massachusetts.What Pavitra really wants, though, is the time and space to finish a novel—to diverge from what’s expected of her within her family of white-collar professionals and to build a life as a writer. Navigating her year of OPT—looking for a room to rent, starting her job—she finds that each person she encounters expects something from her too. As her landlord, colleagues, students, parents of her students, friends of her family, and neighbors talk to and at her, they shape her understanding of race, immigration, privilege, and herself.Throughout the book, Pavitra seems to speak very rarely; and yet, as she responds to the assumptions, insights, p

Who reads Optional Practical Training?

Author

Shubha Sunder

Publisher

Graywolf Press

Published

2025

Language

EN

ISBN

9781644453254

Category

work of fiction

Subjects

Contemporary Fiction, Fiction