Mohan Sikka
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Mohan Sikka is a writer and artist based in New York. Mohan writes about everyday people -- mothers and sons, lovers and friends, servants and masters -- and the ways even ordinary lives can gather into an unexpected moment of tenderness, violence or grace, a moment that can redefine the arc of a life.
Mohan sketches social and familial relationships without sentimentality and with a gentle interrogation of accepted constructs. His work traverses the fault line between domestic order and the pursuit of self-satisfaction -- what we as humans sacrifice to please our families, and what our lives could be like if guilt and convention didn't curb our instinctual desires.
Through his stories, Mohan brings to light a link between the past and the present, the old and the new -- how present-day desires reflect old ways and secret histories. His work drives to the heart of what has really changed inside contemporary identity, for people shaped by the economic forces of the last fifty years.
You can read Mohan's award winning story, "Uncle Musto Takes a Mistress," in the 2009 PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories anthology. Pick it up at your local bookstore or at Amazon today.
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Sikka reinvents himself out of the raw materials of the clan, recording a bittersweet journey, with safety traded for freedom. Sikka’s language is pungent with original idiom; he’s a juicy, melancholic memory machine…
-Laurie Stone | The Village Voice
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