The Indianness
Twelve Stories
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Pub Date Mar 2 2027 | Archive Date Mar 5 2027
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Description
A bold debut story collection about first- and second-generation South Asian Americans coming of age—and coming undone
From Ivy League dormitories and Delhi wedding stages to Roman balconies and North Carolina motels, the twelve stories of The Indianness map the distance between the life a person is expected to build and the one they actually inhabit.
Women anchor the collection: a mother alone in Rome with three young daughters tests the edges of her marriage; a college student arrives at NYU with one rule—save her virginity for an Indian husband—and breaks it before the week is out; a woman manages an abortion alone in a Manhattan clinic, too afraid to tell her husband she was ever pregnant; a former lawyer in Manhattan keeps a diary of a marriage she cannot bring herself to leave. But the men are equally undone: a Harvard-educated lawyer raised in a North Carolina motel confronts a past he can never quite verify; a history teacher in suburban Massachusetts assigns a racist essay, loses his wife, and isn't certain which failure came first; a man raised as a girl until the age of twelve sits with all he has inherited.
The collection challenges the model minority narrative not by dismissing success but by exposing what it costs, moving openly through sex, abortion, marital dissatisfaction, mental health, and sexual violence, and through the silences that live inside families. The Indianness offers a portrait of a community rarely rendered with such interior depth, insisting that South Asian Americans—women and men alike—deserve the same moral complexity, desire, and contradiction long afforded to others in American literary fiction.
Advance Praise
“The Indianness is a straight marvel and a finer truer collection of stories you will not read any time soon. Kohli’s talent is breathtaking, her future limitless.”—Junot Díaz, Pultizer Prize winner and author of This Is How You Lose Her
“Both tender and piercing, Kohli's stories are a pleasure to read.”—Diksha Basu, author of Destination Wedding
“The Indianness is a rich, nuanced exploration of the ness—the liminality, the joys and disappointments, the clarity and confusion–of being Indian in America. In these twelve short stories, Geeta Kohli is a keen observer, a confident writer, and a clear-eyed guide.”—Sameer Pandya, author of Our Beautiful Boys
“These stories have a vast scope: love; family; regret; the vulnerability of the human body. The characters are immigrants and the children of immigrants, their lovers and the various worlds in which they exist, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes in transit. Geeta Kohli is clear-eyed when it comes to human nature, but never ungenerous to her characters. Her sentences are always sure-footed, making the reader feel present in a living, breathing world.”—Kelly Link, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Book of Love
“Kohli gives voice to the resilience and strength of South Asian women in prose that is both intimate and luminous—capturing the moment each decides, against everything, to begin to truly live.”—Professor Sonia Katyal, UC Berkeley Law
“The women who populate The Indianness subtly remind us that the personal is political, and that one person can be emblematic of many. Written with profound sensitivity and grace, Geeta Kohli’s’s outstanding debut story collection touches the heart and sparks the mind.”—Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of Counting Backwards
“The Indianness is a formidable work of literature. An honest and earnest collection that holds up a cultural mirror to its readers, these stories are fierce, unapologetic, raw. With these stories, Kohli has made her mark as a writer to watch.”—Chinelo Okparanta, author of This Impossible Life
“The 12 stories that make up The Indianness delve deep into the intricacies of their characters’ lives with a ferocious kind of intimacy. These are stories revealing the most painful and hidden aspects of South-Asian-American life. An important and illuminating collection.”—Nayomi Munaweera, author of Island of a Thousand Mirrors and What Lies Between Us
Available Editions
| EDITION | Paperback |
| ISBN | 9781625349941 |
| PRICE | $24.95 (USD) |
| PAGES | 184 |