Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: If You See Me, Don’t Say Hi
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.neelnpatel.com/
CITY: Los Angeles
STATE: CA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2018005482
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2018005482
HEADING: Patel, Neel
000 00581cz a2200121n 450
001 10661550
005 20180130134614.0
008 180130n| azannaabn |n aaa
010 __ |a n 2018005482
040 __ |a DLC |b eng |e rda |c DLC
053 _0 |a PS3616.A86648
100 1_ |a Patel, Neel
670 __ |a If you see me, don’t say hi, 2018: |b ECIP t.p. (Neel Patel) data view (first-generation Indian American who grew up in Champaign, Illinois; his short stories have appeared in The Southampton Review, Indiana Review, The American Literary Review, Hyphen Magazine, and on Nerve.com; he currently lives in Los Angeles)
PERSONAL
Male.
ADDRESS
CAREER
WRITINGS
Contributor of short fiction to literary publications, including Southampton Review, Indiana Review, American Literary Review, Hyphen, and on BuzzFeed and Nerve.com.
SIDELIGHTS
Neel Patel is a first-generation Indian American who grew up in Champaign, Illinois. He writes short fiction about racial and gender stereotypes and overcoming them, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His short stories have apepared in various media including Indiana Review, American Literary Review, Hyphen, and on BuzzFeed and Nerve.com. He lives in Los Angeles.
His debut collection of eleven short stories is the 2018 If You See Me, Don’t Say Hi, named a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and a best book of the summer by Vanity Fair, Guardian, and Wall Street Journal. The collection addresses Indian Americans primarily in the suburban Midwest who contradict societal expectations, yet resonate with readers of all backgrounds. “Patel explores universal themes in unexpected ways and excels at portraying nuanced characters,” noted Kathy Sexton in Booklist. The stories also explore loss and restraint, and class differences.
In the title story, two brothers who are rivals are consumed with envy and desire for achievement. In other stories, a woman dates a man her family approves of yet has a one night stand with a stranger, a young gay college dropout dates a much older man only to learn the man’s terrible secret, and in two linked stories, a boy and girl are the subjects of community gossip when they are children and again when they are adults when the woman is divorced and the man is struggling with his medical career.
According to a writer in Kirkus Reviews, Patel focuses his stories on “a sense of loss, more powerful for its quiet restraint … Patel’s deep sense of empathy—and infuriatingly relatable characters—shines throughout. A melancholic pleasure with a sense of humor.” Patel’s casual yet feverish stories describe Indian Americans struggling to please or break away from their traditional families in rebellion that is sneaky or ineffective, noted a writer in Publishers Weekly. The writer added: “Patel has a knack for depicting the gap between how characters experience their lives and how they are expected to be seen.”
In Library Journal, Neal Wyatt noted how Patel gives his characters empathy and praised “the effect of his gorgeously rendered sentences.” Rather than reduce his characters to Indian American stereotypes, “Instead, they’re introduced through a panorama of character studies—tentative, tenuous and stray observations of people humbled by their emotions. Perhaps Patel wishes to vest the literature of immigrants and their children with universal ambitions,” reported Shaj Mathew online at New York Times Online.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, June 1, 2018, Kathy Sexton, review of If You See Me, Don’t Say Hi, p. 32.
Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2018, review of If You See Me, Don’t Say Hi.
Publishers Weekly, May 14, 2018, review of If You See Me, Don’t Say Hi, p. 31.
ONLINE
Library Journal, https://www.libraryjournal.com/ (July 9 2018), Neal Wyatt, review of If You See Me, Don’t Say Hi.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (August 24, 2018), Shaj Mathew, review of If You See Me, Don’t Say Hi.
Neel Patel is a first-generation Indian American who grew up in Champaign, Illinois. His short stories have appeared in Indiana Review, The Southampton Review, Hyphen Magazine, The American Literary Review, and on Nerve.com. His first book, If You See Me, Don't Say Hi, will be published this summer, July 10, 2018, by Flatiron Books, an imprint of Macmillan. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is at work on a novel.
Print Marked Items
Patel, Neel: IF YOU SEE ME, DON'T
SAY HI
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 15, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Patel, Neel IF YOU SEE ME, DON'T SAY HI Flatiron Books (Adult Fiction) $24.99 7, 10 ISBN: 978-1-
250-18319-4
Always thoughtful and often aching, the 11 sharp stories in Patel's debut find his characters--mostly firstgeneration
Indian-Americans; usually young, or youngish; often in Midwestern cities--navigating love, loss,
and disappointment.
In "god of destruction," which opens the collection, an unhappy interior designer has a one-night stand with
the 22-year-old cable guy after a botched internet date. "No one ever told me that happiness was like a
currency: that when it goes, it goes, and that few people are willing to give you some of theirs," she reflects.
Later, she'll write the incident out of her history. In "just a friend," a 22-year-old college dropout meets a
handsome married dentist at a Chicago gay bar only to find out, after a romantic weekend together, that the
man isn't who he seems. The title story is both the simplest and the showstopper, about the troubled
relationship between two brothers, told from the perspective of the high-achieving youngest, now a doctor.
It's an empathetic family portrait, exquisitely subtle, without villains; their falling out, when it happens,
triggered by a comment over a white girlfriend, is about nothing and also everything. The silence between
them lasts for 10 years. The collection ends with an unexpected pair of linked stories following a boy and a
girl who met as kids and again as adults, both of them having become items of community gossip. When
they reconnect in their Illinois hometown, in his story, she's newly and scandalously divorced; he hasn't
matched for a residency after medical school. Her story picks up years later, after both of them have
achieved something like success. At the core of Patel's stories is a sense of loss, more powerful for its quiet
restraint. Not every story is an equal knockout, which is a hazard of the format, but Patel's deep sense of
empathy--and infuriatingly relatable characters--shines throughout.
A melancholic pleasure with a sense of humor.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Patel, Neel: IF YOU SEE ME, DON'T SAY HI." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A538294041/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7e675d0f.
Accessed 19 Oct. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A538294041
Sexton, Kathy. Booklist. 6/1/2018, Vol. 114 Issue 19/20, p32-33. 2p. , Database: MasterFILE Premier
Subjects: IF You See Me, Don't Say Hi (Book); PATEL, Neel; INTERPERSONAL relations; FICTION
If You See M e, D on't Say Hi. By Neel Patel. July 2 0 1 8 .224p . Flatiron, $ 2 4 .9 9 (9 7 8 1 2 5 0 1 8 3 1 9 4 ). Debut-author Patel’s 10 compact yet meaty stories feature characters— most of them first-generation Indian Americans, as the author is— trying to navigate a world full of expectations (go to college, land a prestigious job, get married, have children) only to find themselves continually thwarted. Like the young man in the story “Just a Friend,” who finds himself in a seemingly perfect, whirlwind relationship with an older man, and soon discovers that nothing is what it seems. Or the woman who is dating the “right” man (one her parents approve of) yet seeks out a one-night stand with the Wi-Fi fix-it guy. Several of the stories deal with young love, of the kind where characters imagine themselves together forever only to end up strangers (hence the book’s title). Patel explores universal themes in unexpected ways and excels at portraying nuanced characters in even the briefest stories. Readers in search of a fresh new voice should be on the lookout for Patel. —Kathy Sexton
Publishers Weekly. 5/14/2018, Vol. 265 Issue 20, p31-32. 2p. Reading Level (Lexile): 1340. , Database: MasterFILE Premier
Neel Patel. Flatiron, $24.99 (224p) ISBN 978- 1-250-18319-4
The 11 seemingly casual and quietly feverish stories in Patel's debut follow the plight of young first- or second-generation Indian-Americans. Some characters are gay and some straight, but most of them have grown up in suburban Midwest towns where they are viewed as vaguely exotic as, in an effort to find love, they struggle to please or break away from their families. Expected to become doctors or lawyers, they often rebel in sneaky or ineffective ways. In the wrenching "Just a Friend," 22-year-old bartender Jonathan falls for, and completely fails to understand, the much older, anxious immigrant Ashwin, who wears expensive clothes and conceals or lies about most of the details of his life. In the title story, the narrator and his older brother, Deepak, move from a close friendship to a state of war over the decades, as Deepak flunks out of a "marginally rated college," joining his disappointed parents in running the motel they own, while the narrator goes to medical school. "World Famous" is told from the point of view of a member of an ill-fated couple: Ankur, a medical student from a wealthy family, is attracted to his former high school classmate Anjali, whose family is upwardly aspiring, but their relationship is doomed because of their class discrepancy. Patel has a knack for depicting the gap between how characters experience their lives and how they are expected to be seen—and how those gaps can widen into life-changing fractures. This is a perceptive, moving collection. (July)
Run Your Week: Big Books, Sure Bets, & Titles Making News | Book Pulse
by Neal Wyatt
Jul 09, 2018 | Filed in Reviews+
If You See Me, Don’t Say Hi: Stories by Neel Patel (Flatiron: Macmillan): “Neel Patel’s debut short story collection is filled with tales of imperfection and longing, of unfulfilled wishes that fight hard against expectations. His flawed characters know what they risk when their actions don’t match the standard script of perfection they’ve been handed, but their need for love and acceptance always prevails, sometimes with heartbreaking results. Patel’s empathy toward his characters is palpable, as is the effect of his gorgeously rendered sentences. If You See Me, Don’t Say Hi is a wonderful read: necessary, aching, and alive.” —Mo Daviau, Powell’s Books for Home and Garden, Portland, OR
FICTION
A Debut Story Collection, Filled With Characters Humbled by Love
By Shaj Mathew
Aug. 24, 2018
IF YOU SEE ME, DON’T SAY HI
By Neel Patel
208 pp. Flatiron Books. $24.99.
Neel Patel’s debut story collection is a study of doomed attachments. In “If You See Me, Don’t Say Hi,” no one is spared: Friendships fester, marriages combust and families fall into civilized distemper. Where did it all go wrong? Patel’s characters are trying to piece it together. In elaborate feats of retrospection, his 11 narrators re-enact conversations with lovers and friends, scrambling their memories for clues and causes. Hailing from backgrounds wealthy and working class, closeted and out, coastal and country, they seem to share a talent for unrequited love.
That and an Indian-American heritage. This collection has everything to do with its characters’ hyphenated identity and yet, somehow, nothing to do with it at all. Patel’s Indian-American characters aren’t reduced to the status of model minorities or 7-11 owners. Instead, they’re introduced through a panorama of character studies — tentative, tenuous and stray observations of people humbled by their emotions. Perhaps Patel wishes to vest the literature of immigrants and their children with universal ambitions. Or perhaps he wants to skirt the question of cultural representation completely. Both impulses, two sides of the same coin, are fair.
Image
Patel gets the patter of the Indian-American household just right; the prim palaver around the tea salver strikes the right balance of nosiness and restraint. But pushed to their limits, the voices in “If You See Me, Don’t Say Hi” can become defiant, needy, jealous and cold. Patel’s characters may not learn from experience, but they pursue it with vigor — part of what makes the collection so refreshing. Where so much fiction about the immigrant family tends to become an exercise in anthropology, a study of inherited customs foisted on a child caught between cultures, Patel’s characters are fundamentally engaged with the world. Interiority is traded for immediacy.
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This lust for action pairs nicely with Patel’s skill set: His gifts are not so much psychological as dramatic. He has a screenwriter’s knack for getting everyone in the same room, and the early stories fuse plot and subplot in a consistently surprising fashion. With bow-tie endings, Patel reminds his characters — who covet their own agency — that some things are really out of their hands. And he also reminds readers who’s in charge: Lest they become accustomed to tidy finales, the later stories deliberately fray at the ends.
The collection’s two last (and two best) stories offer what could pass as the author’s thesis statement. In “World Famous” and “Radha, Krishna,” we see the same series of events from opposing points of view, and yet we come no closer to understanding what has happened. These stories, like most of the others, grieve not for individuals but for the idea that they can ever really be known. Similarly, in the title story two brothers become estranged from each other and from their partners. Race appears to open a chasm in one of the relationships, but it turns out that no union — interracial or endogamous, fraternal or romantic — is safe. All ties in Patel’s world unravel according to their own precise logic: none at all.
“If You See Me, Don’t Say Hi” isn’t about characters wedged between tradition and modernity. That reviewer’s cliché, peddled even by the publisher’s promotional material, misreads Patel’s aims. While the collection does reflect the tensions that arise between Indian-American children and their immigrant parents, its characters’ failures don’t arise solely from a clash of cultures. Rather, their problems point to a truth altogether more sobering. “When it came to love,” one character reminds us, “everyone was from a foreign place.”
EDITORS’ PICKS
The Bright Future and Grim Death of a Privileged Hollywood Daughter
A Tragedy in the Tattoo Parlor
Tonya Harding Would Like Her Apology Now
Shaj Mathew has contributed to The New Republic, The New Yorker and other publications.
Best summer books 2018, as picked by writers and cultural figures – part two
From Pulitzer prize-winners to Penguin classics, poetry anthologies to the latest page-turners, here are the books to take to the beach this summer
by Celeste Ng
The stories in Neel Patel’s If You See Me, Don’t Say Hi (Flatiron) are perfect bitesize morsels for the beach, travel legs or quiet moments. Mackenzi Lee’s Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue (Harper Collins)is a giddy whirlwind romp of a love story; I can’t wait for the forthcoming sequel. Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark (Canongate) is an argument for continuing to take action, even when everything feels uncertain, and will send you back home from holiday ready to carry on. I’m going to London with my family, and bringing Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (Text), Justina Ireland’s Dread Nation (Balzer & Bray) – zombies plus the American civil war plus a fierce female fighter – and an advance copy of Edward Carey’s forthcoming Little (Aardvark Bureau), about the girl who grows up to become Madame Tussaud.
NEW AUDIOBOOKS FOR JULY!
KATIE MACBRIDE
07-06-18
IF YOU SEE ME, DON’T SAY HI: STORIES; WRITTEN AND READ BY NEEL PATEL; RELEASE DATE: 07-10-18
I know people say not to judge a book by its cover, but I am judging it by the title and I LOVE IT. I’m also a sucker for linked stories which, when I was writing fiction, was what I wanted to do. “In 11 sharp, surprising stories, Neel Patel gives voice to our most deeply held stereotypes and then slowly undermines them. His characters, almost all of who are first-generation Indian Americans, subvert our expectations that they will sit quietly by. We meet two brothers caught in an elaborate web of envy and loathing; a young gay man who becomes involved with an older man whose secret he could never guess; three women who almost gleefully throw off the pleasant agreeability society asks of them; and, in the final pair of linked stories, a young couple struggling against the devastating force of community gossip.”