Alfred State to Host Author Rahul Mehta Feb. 15

Alfred State will host author Rahul Mehta on Wednesday, Feb. 15, at 7 p.m. in room 215 of the Engineering Building on the Alfred campus. The event, which is sponsored by the college’s English Department, student literary magazine Ergo, the Drama Club, and the Rainbow Union, is open to the public free of charge. There will be a reception following his talk.

Mehta’s presentation will consist of his reading an essay he wrote about his coming out to his parents. He will also discuss the title story of his most recently published book "Quarantine."

Mehta is the author of the short story collection Quarantine, published by Harper Perennial in 2011 and by Random House India in 2010, and named by the American Library Association as one of the top 10 LGBT books of 2011. His short fiction has appeared in Epoch, the Kenyon Review, the Sun, Fourteen Hills, and elsewhere, and has been included in the prize anthology New Stories from the South, the Year's Best, 2009. His recent essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the International Herald Tribune, Marie Claire India, and the Telegraph. An Out Magazine "Out 100" honoree for 2011, Mehta is working on a novel, to be published by Harper Collins in 2014. Born and raised in West Virginia, Rahul currently lives in Alfred and is a visiting lecturer at Alfred University.

Quarantine has received rave reviews since its publication.

• “Quarantine is an extraordinary book that transcends gender and race and culture and sexual identity to speak to our universal humanity and the quest we all share for a self.” (Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain)
• “Because Rahul Mehta’s characters are so richly and deeply rendered, because action and situation are so closely observed, these stories transcend all the categories that they are also determined to cut across. Quarantine is the best first collection I have read in over 20 years.” (Madison Smartt Bell, National Book Award winning author of All Souls' Rising)
• “Mehta’s voice is smart, intimate without being over-the-shoulder, tells secrets from the armchair, and always gestures toward something inexplicable and heretofore unknown in the next room. The stories in this collection make me want to burn money, to have more courage, and to fall in love.” (Rebecca Curtis, author of Twenty Grand and Others Tales of Love & Money)
• “Rahul Mehta is a technician of the first order… his storytelling is superb. Quarantine offers a candid appraisal of what it means to be a second-generation Indian-American, and particularly a homosexual Indian-American.” (Iowa Review)
• “A rich study of family ties, romantic failings and cultural disconnection told in crisp, clean prose.” (Kirkus)
• “Quarantine is an insightful and compellingly readable collection of stories in which Rahul Mehta masterfully explores the emotions, the conflicts, the complex accommodations of being gay and Indian American.” (Manil Suri, bestselling author of The Death of Vishnu and The Age of Shiva)