Ankur Thakkar Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Ankur Thakkar is a published author and a multimedia artist.

He is known for writing Blow Yourself Up, his first novel. He was a Tennessee Williams Scholar in 2025 at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. His writing has also been featured in TriQuarterly, Guernica, and PANK.

His piece “Swipe” was selected by Medium as one of the best personal essays that was about the Internet. The artwork he has done has been shown at places such as La Friche la Belle de Mai and the Palais de Tokyo.

He chose MFA then NYC and today makes his home in Brooklyn, New York.

Once he had gotten his graduate degree in fiction, he spent much of his career working for tech platforms and was able to see first hand how they were evolving and they were changing people as much as they were changing the tech platforms. He says that if the Internet were to have a heart that it would be connection, a great lens to understand ‘its brightest stars and darkest corners’.

Twelve years went by from the author having the start of the idea to the time that the novel was sold. He says that he reached out to agents about three times during that time period and every time rewrote the novel completely. The love story is the core of the novel and Thakkar recounts that it had always been there but ‘what was once a speculative story’ moved into realism as ‘our reality grew dystopian’.

Blow Yourself Up is a 2026 novel by Ankur Thakkar. If you have been looking for something new and contemporary to read but you don’t know where to start, give this book a try. This is the tale of first love that moves across cities that has covered the decade that actually transformed the Internet.

Arjun and Payal both attend an elite East Coast high school and they start falling for each other even as the world starts to move towards the digital. Over the course of the next eight years, their paths start to go in different directions and soon it seems like no time in all before they are headed on differently diverging trajectories.

Payal keeps going and hit the top of the influencer economy of New York. Payal also manages to find a sense of fame while on Boost, which is a looping video app. It is very demanding but it is also very rewarding too. It’s a good way to make some money so he keeps up at it, hoping that putting his time and his efforts into the system will give him some positive results. Like so many others, he is putting his optimism and hope into the algorithm and hoping that it will pay out for him.

At the same time, Arjun is a musician who is living in a huge office in Chicago. While his dreams may have quieted down he is still cleaning up the debris on the platform and moderates some of the darkest videos on the Internet. When an act of violence that is political in nature happens against a musician and it goes viral, the break in reality makes the two of them have to face the very motivations of the platforms that they so frequently inhabit.

The result is an up close look at creative ambition and how our identity continually changes. This is a story of how love can take place in the times of scrolling on endlessly and takes a closer look at what we end up giving up so that we can be seen in the end.

Can Arjun and Payal find what they are looking for or are they about to discover that they are stuck in their realities of having terrible jobs and lives without love in them? Read this book to find out what happens– get a copy of Blow Yourself Up and follow along with every word in a novel that author R.O. Kwon says ‘alarms and delights’.