COSMIC HOTEL

Sandeep Sanghavi, the mixed-race son of an Indian businesswoman and a famous American astronomer lives a nomadic albeit mundane life traveling the country with his mother’s hotel consulting firm. His life becomes more interesting when various lost objects suddenly begin to reappear.

Then a stranger calls and claims responsibility for the returned objects in exchange for an introduction to Sandeep’s astronomer father, the rebellious and eccentric Van Ray, who has no phone, email or qualms about having abandoned his son twenty years ago.

Van Ray shows up broke with his pregnant ex-wife astronaut in tow, claiming to have discovered a big secret that will change their lives forever; a new discovery guaranteed to change him from “science famous” to “famous famous.”

With his family together for the first time in years, Sandeep must juggle his father’s scientific search, his mother’s failing business and the tension of having family all together for the first time in decades. In an empty and decaying hotel by the Atlanta airport, a family turns their attention to the cosmos but find there is still much they do not understand about the familiar things around them.

FRANKLIN has degrees in math, physics, and literature, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University, as well as a Kingsbury Fellow at Florida State University. His work has appeared in Oxford American, Alaska Quarterly Review, Greensboro Review, and other publications. Franklin’s been the recipient of both Stegner and Capote Fellowships, and has received Pushcart nominations, he's been nominated for the Walt McDonald Prize, and his stories have been included in the Best American Non-Required Reading. He teaches writing at Florida State University in Tallahassee.