Florid arrangements

Mary Anne Mohanraj was in high school when her mom dropped a bombshell: "I've sent your photo to Sri Lanka, and there's been some interest."

She knew her parents' marriage had been arranged, but she never thought that she—New England prep school–bred and a U.S. resident since age two-and-a-half—would carry on the tradition. "This is not happening," Mohanraj told her mother. She eventually escaped her parents' strict rule by attending the University of Chicago. But when they found out she was canoodling with white boys, the screaming matches continued long-distance.

In her new collection of linked stories, Bodies in Motion (HarperCollins, $22.95), Mohanraj explores this sort of dispute. Set in the U.S. and Sri Lanka, the book follows several generations of two Tamil families through intersections of young love and cultural heritage, personal ambition and familial responsibility. Some choose arranged marriages, others chart their own courses, but all the characters struggle for connection.

None of the stories in Bodies is directly autobiographical, but Mohanraj says all her characters bear traces of her identity. Like Mayil, a headstrong U. of C. student in "Acts of Faith," Mohanraj always knew English was the academic route for her.

"I was scared that if I wrote a book about [one woman] making a choice around dating or whatever else, people would take it as canonical," says Mohanraj, who lives in Wicker Park. "I do what I can to make it hard for readers to assume authenticity by not telling one single story."

Some stories take the male perspective: In "Challah," Gabriel is the Jewish lover of Roshan, a first-generation Sri Lankan–American. After the men share a passionate night together, Gabriel is furious when Roshan confesses that he's married, if only to please—and fool—his parents.

The strong sexual current running through Bodies can be traced back to Mohanraj's early fiction writing. After a techie boyfriend introduced her to the Internet in its early-'90s stone age, she posted her first story, "American Airlines Cockpit," to an erotica newsgroup. She laughs and says it's awful, but you can unearth it from her website, www.mamohanraj.com.

Motivated by feedback, she continued writing erotica "with no intention of doing it seriously," churning out some 30 stories in three years. In 1995 she started an online journal, one of the first of its kind, on which she still posts regularly. She wrote a book of poems, also fairly steeped in sexuality, that one of her readers offered to publish. When he told her he could offer a $500 advance, Mohanraj was shocked to learn she could get paid for her work.

The offer pushed her to try writing for a living. She figured the best way would be to write the sort of sci-fi and fantasy novels she devoured as a kid. Then she attended Clarion West, a science-fiction writers workshop, where two editors critiqued her work-in-progress, a fantasy novel about an Indian prostitute.

"They sat me down and said, 'Look, this is totally mediocre,'" she says. "'We've read your short stories and we think you have literary pretensions, and what you really want to do is be a serious mainstream writer. You need to go home and think about what you really want to do.'"

"I went back to my room and cried," she recalls. "Because I thought I wanted to be a schlocky fantasy writer."

Mohanraj took the editors' advice. And while her book is getting a push from her publisher—which is rare for a book of short stories—that doesn't mean she hasn't suffered some sleepless nights.

"In the early days of the Net," she says, "I was well-known, and it was really comfortable there. The idea of stepping out into the big lit world was terrifying."

And how does she feel now? "Extra-terrified. Publishing literary fiction feels like diving into the deep end without being quite sure that you know how to swim. I'll really just be grateful if I can avoid a painful belly flop. And not drown. Not drowning would be good."

Bodies in Motion comes to a stop in stores Friday 1.