How to Date a Fanatic: A Novel

by Aruni Kashyap

In this compassionate, poignant novel set in contemporary India, a young professor searches for connection and love during a time of political and cultural upheaval.

As political tensions rise precipitously across India, Rohit returns to Delhi University to teach and gets caught in a web of unrequited love with his friend Dhruv. To alleviate his inevitable heartbreak, Rohit seeks relationships with other men on campus, until he meets and embarks on a delicate new romance with the effervescent Sayan, a literature student he hopes will be the answer to getting over Dhruv.

Rohit’s life soon becomes more complicated as the country's political tensions erupt on campus, sparking a turbulent student-led movement that entangles Rohit when Dhruv joins the fray, a tipping point that changes Rohit’s life forever. Set against the vibrant, volatile tapestry of modern India, Rohit and his friends must learn to navigate the challenges and triumphs of queer life to survive in an unpredictable political landscape.

Propulsive, tense, and charged with humor and tenderness, How to Date a Fanatic is an exploration of identity, connection, and the enduring hope for a better future in a rapidly changing world.

368 pages, Paperback

Expected publication July 14, 2026

About the author

Aruni Kashyap is the author of The Way You Want To Be Loved, The House With a Thousand Stories, and the forthcoming How to Date a Fanatic. Along with editing a collection of stories called How to Tell the Story of an Insurgency, he is the translator of four novels from Assamese to English. A 2024 Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fellow at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, he is also the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Faculty Research Grants in the Humanities and Arts Program, the Arts Lab Faculty Fellowship, and the Charles Wallace India Trust Scholarship for Creative Writing to the University of Edinburgh, his poetry collection, There is No Good Time for Bad News, was nominated for the 58th Georgia Author of the Year Awards 2022, a finalist for the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize, and the Four Way Books Levis Award in Poetry.
His translations, which have been shortlisted for the 2023 and 2024 Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation and VOW Book Awards 2024, include The Bronze Sword of Tengphakhri Tehsildar by Indira Goswami (Zubaan), My Poems Are Not for Your Ad Campaign by Anuradha Sarma Pujari (Penguin), An Illuminated Valley by Dipak Kumar Barkakaty (Penguin), and Ten Love Stories and a Story of Despair (Westland). He has served as a visiting writer at Lander University, Minnesota State University, Converse University, The College of William & Mary, Valdosta State University, Dibrugarh University, Assam Don Bosco University, and delivered the Tagore Lecture in Modern Indian Literature at Cornell University. His short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Granta, The Boston Review, Electric Literature, Catapult, Bitch Media, The Kenyon Review, The LitHub, The Oxford Anthology of Writings from the Northeast, The New York Times, The Guardian UK, and others. He also writes in Assamese and is the author of a novel, Noikhon Etia Duroit, and three novellas. He is an Associate Professor of English & Creative Writing and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Georgia, Athens.