Gay Indian-Americans in Rahul Mehta's Quarantine

Two years ago, Madison Smartt Bell edited New Stories from the South 2009, selecting, alongside work from Wendell Berry and Jill McCorkle, "Quarantine," a piece by Rahul Mehta about a young Indian-American bringing home his boyfriend to meet his parents in West Virginia. (Mehta was born and raised there.) Last year, his collection of stories, Quarantine [[Kindle]], all of them about gay Indian-Americans, was published in hardcover in India to much acclaim, some fuss, and surprisingly strong sales. Now, at last, Harper has released Mehta's book here as a paperback original. Praising the richness and depth of his characters and observations, Madison Smartt Bell calls it "the best first collection I have read in twenty years." Pankaj Mishra considers Mehta's voice "gentle, even tender, but powerful." Manil Suri says the stories are "insightful and compellingly readable." I haven't seen the collection and am greatly anticipating reading the stories.

Mehta gave a long interview to The Hindu Literary Review in which he discussed how long the collection took to write (nine years), the amount of sex included (readers: not enough, his mother: too much), and writers he admires (Lydia Davis, Amy Hempel, Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth, and Mohsin Hamid, among others).