Kiran Desai reads her story “An Unashamed Proposal,” from the August 11, 2025, issue of the magazine. Desai is the author of the novels “Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard” and “The Inheritance of Loss,” which won the Booker Prize in 2006. A new novel, “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” from which this story was adapted, will be published this fall.