Katy Family is a story collection with an expansive array of voices-the lives of Bangladeshis are told through the prismatic and astute lens of remarkable storytelling. With keen craftsmanship and imagination, Gemini Wahhaj creates characters who take journeys to unknown territories, both geographically and personally. Her stories investigate how one can be familiar with many places but never at home. Her characters live between hope and grace and work to find connection in everything around them. A beautiful, vivid collection, these stories are lucid and wise, and Wahhaj is a remarkable writer."

-Nina McConigley, Cowboys and East Indians

Wahhaj's stories are addictive-richly observed, thrumming with sly depictions of ambition and hypocrisy, painting a luminous panorama of an American subculture in all its comic and tender complexity.

-Elizabeth McKenzie, MacGregor Tells the World and Stop That Girl

In Katy Family, Gemini Wahhaj turns her intellect, humor, and a sharp eye toward affluent, professional Bangladeshi immigrants on the outskirts of Houston, examining their fraught, ostentatious, and sometimes absurd social lives. These stories are as funny as they are poignant and as sharp as they are tender. Full of surprise and delight, without a hint of exoticism or nostalgia, these American lives are reflected back to us in ways you would never expect. You will love this collection.

-Chaitali Sen, A New Race of Men from Heaven

Gemini Wahhaj's Katy Family is an exceptionally accomplished and perceptive short story collection. At times, it's also very funny. Wahhaj's insights into the contradictory forces of nostalgia and attachment; ambition, competition, and scorn that her characters, many of them émigrés to the U.S., experience in regard to their homeland, brought to mind Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies. Above all, however, Wahhaj understands the contrariness of the human heart. Katy Family is a terrific book.

-Christine Marie Sneed, Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos, Little Known Facts, and Paris

Publisher: Jackleg Press

Pub date: 2025-04-14

Length: 320 pages