By: Rahul Mehta

Reminiscent of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies and the work of Michael Cunningham, Rahul Mehta’s debut short story collection is an emotionally arresting exploration of the lives of Indian-American gay men and their families

With buoyant humor and incisive, cunning prose, Rahul Mehta sets off into uncharted literary territory with these characters from a new demographic: openly gay Indian-American men. Westernized in some ways, with cosmopolitan views on friendship and sex, the characters in Quarantine also struggle to maintain relationships with their families and cultural traditions. As gay men, they grapple with issues of social acceptance, the right to pursue happiness, and the heavy toll of listening to their hearts and bodies; as children of immigrants, they wrestle with the elder generation’s attachment to old-country ways, their unwillingness to assimilate, and their resistance to an open acceptance of homosexuality. Breaking away from their forebears’ self-inflicted ghettoization, these young men find themselves paradoxically estranged from their cultural in-group and yet still set apart from larger society—quarantined.

Lyrical, provocative, emotionally wrenching, frequently funny, and already a runaway success in India, Quarantine marks the debut of a unique literary talent and casts a spotlight on an often overlooked yet increasingly passionate community.