5. Gold Diggers” may be made into a TV show or film and Sanjena will be co-writing the adaptation. Better yet, Mindy Kaling's production company, Kaling International, already optioned film and TV rights. “An option is stage one on a very long journey to possibly having a TV show made, but a very exciting first step,” Sanjena wrote.
6. Sanjena wanted to get the cover art for “Gold Diggers” right. Sanjena and her editors wondered, “How could we evoke India, America, and Indian-America? How could we hint that the novel contains both serious and comic elements, both magic and realism? Could a single cover point to the novel's four eras and geographies: 1849 gold rush California, 1980s Bombay, 2006 suburban Georgia, and 2016 Silicon Valley?” They nailed it If you want to judge “Gold Diggers” by its cover, go right ahead—Penguin Press's designers collaborated with the Bombay-based artists at Sky Goodies to create the Indian matchbox art-inspired work of art. If you look closely, you’ll see gold jewelry, suburban homes of Georgia, pickaxes and shovels, and other elements of the book.
7. With “Gold Diggers” coming out at a time when violence against the AAPI community has surged and continues to rise in the United States, Sanjena is taking the opportunity to speak up. “Fiction is never a manual for undoing racism,” she wrote recently/. “But I think novels do something to the collective imagination. Perhaps reading this one will affect your own notion of America. Or maybe it offers an escape for a few hours. Either way, I hope it means something to readers in these painful times.”
8. Sanjena wrote "Gold Diggers" in a cobwebby attic in Iowa when she was a graduate student at the Iowa Writer's Project at the University of Iowa. She turned in an early version of the book as a short story to workshop right after the first Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships Fall Conference that she attended. "It was a disaster but a friend helped me salvage it," Sanjena wrote.
9. What does restaurant does Sanjena recommend in Georgia? "I am obsessed with Chai Pani whose slogan is 'Namaste y'all.'" You can read her OZY piece on new Indian cuisine here. ∎