Peacocks of Instagram is a fresh and intimate debut collection of short stories filled with the dilemmas, heartbreaks, and joys of diasporic Indians. Peacocks of Instagram is a fresh and intimate debut collection of short stories filled with the dilemmas, heartbreaks, and joys of diasporic Indians. In these brilliant and witty stories, Deepa Rajagopalan centres a cast of Indian women who are flawed, enterprising, and filled with desire. In the award-winning title story, an underappreciated server in a coffee shop attracts tens of thousands of followers on social media with her peacock accessories. A hotel housekeeper up against a world of gender and class inequality quietly gets revenge on her chauvinist boss. A young woman navigates the landscape of loneliness after abruptly leaving her home in India by learning to drive over it. An eight-year-old finds her entire life uprooted when her mother needs a new kidney. A fiercely independent engineer does not decamp to the sidelines of an affair but takes up space, living her life as variously as possible. Peacocks of Instagram deftly questions what it means to be safe, to survive, and to call a place home. With an intense awareness of privilege and the lack of it, these fourteen subtle and affecting stories explore and indulge in the imperfection of the human condition. - The title story in the collection won the 2021 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award, and the full manuscript was Deepa Rajagopalan's thesis project in the MFA Program at the University of Guelph, under the supervision of Scotiabank Giller Prizewinner Souvankham Thammavongsa. - The book's overarching mood is one of unflinching resilience through grit and humour. These stories center around the desires and heartbreak of racialized characters who defy the standard tropes used to express immigrant experiences and greet them with wit and humour. - Existentialism, or the focus on the basic human condition, the focus on the subjective experience of thinking, feeling, and acting, has traditionally been a concern of the dominant culture in literature. What if not being sure of oneself, feeling disconnected from oneself, feeling like one must reinvent oneself, were also concerns of people of colour? - For fans of Roar (either short story collection by Ceclilia Ahern or the TV show), Arundhati Roy's novel The God of Small Things, or Jhumpa Lahiri's story "A Temporary Matter"

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