Download or read book The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories written by Jamil Jan Kochai and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-07-11 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: FINALIST FOR THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION WINNER OF THE 2023 ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE, AND THE 2023 O. HENRY PRIZE NAMED ONE OF THE NEW YORKER'S BEST BOOKS OF 2022 "An endlessly inventive and moving collection from a thrilling and capacious young talent." —Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins. A luminous new collection of stories from a young writer who “has brought his culture’s rich history, mythology, and lyricism to American letters.” —Sandra Cisneros Pen/Hemingway finalist Jamil Jan Kochai breathes life into his contemporary Afghan characters, moving between modern-day Afghanistan and the Afghan diaspora in America. In these arresting stories verging on both comedy and tragedy, often starring young characters whose bravado is matched by their tenderness, Kochai once again captures “a singular, resonant voice, an American teenager raised by Old World Afghan storytellers.”* In “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain," a young man's video game experience turns into a surreal exploration on his own father's memories of war and occupation. Set in Kabul, "Return to Sender" follows two married doctors driven by guilt to leave the US and care for their fellow Afghans, even when their own son disappears. A college student in the US in "Hungry Ricky Daddy" starves himself in protest of Israeli violence against Palestine. And in the title story, "The Haunting of Hajji Hotak," we learn the story of a man codenamed Hajji, from the perspective of a government surveillance worker, who becomes entrenched in the immigrant family's life. The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories is a moving exploration of characters grappling with the ghosts of war and displacement—and one that speaks to the immediate political landscape we reckon with today. *The New York Times Book Review
Download or read book 99 Nights in Logar written by Jamil Jan Kochai and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-01-22 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Funny, razor-sharp, and full of juicy tales that feel urgent and illicit . . . the author has created a singular, resonant voice, an American teenager raised by Old World Afghan storytellers.” —New York Times Book Review “More than well crafted; it’s phenomenal. . . . Kochai’s book has a big heart.” —The Guardian A dog on the loose. A boy yearning to connect to his family's roots. A country in the midst of great change. And a vibrant exploration of the power of stories--the ones we tell each other and the ones we find ourselves in. Twelve-year-old Marwand's memories from his previous visit to Afghanistan six years ago center on his contentious relationship with Budabash, the terrifying but beloved dog who guards his extended family's compound in the rural village of Logar. But eager for an ally in this place that is meant to be "home," Marwand misreads his reunion with the dog and approaches Budabash the way he would any pet on his American suburban block--and the results are disastrous: Marwand loses a finger, and Budabash escapes into the night. Marwand is not chastened and doubles down on his desire to fit in here. He must get the dog back, and the resulting search is a gripping and vivid adventure story, a lyrical, funny, and surprisingly tender coming-of-age journey across contemporary Afghanistan that blends the bravado and vulnerability of a boy's teenage years with an homage to familial oral tradition and calls to mind One Thousand and One Nights yet speaks with a voice all its own.
Download or read book Quarantine written by Rahul Mehta and published by Random House India. This book was released on 2011-12-02 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Last week during one of our marathon telephone conversations my mother asked me which one of us, me or Frank, was the woman in our relationship. ‘Neither of us, obviously,’ I said. ‘That’s what makes us gay.’ ‘Very funny,’ my mom said. ‘Someone on Oprah said that often gay couples have one person who plays the man and the other who plays the woman. So I was wondering which you were.’ ‘Frank and I don’t believe in hetero-normative gender roles,’ I told her. I knew my mom didn’t know what ‘hetero-normative’ meant, so I figured she’d drop it. ‘So who does the cooking and cleaning?’ she asked. I could have truthfully answered ‘neither of us.’ Instead I asked, ‘Is that what you think womanhood is, Mom, cooking and cleaning?’ Rahul Mehta’s stories are inhabited by young, gay Indian men on the wrong side of the American dream: adrift in the world, in complicated relationships, and with uncertain futures. Here are lovers who go to a nightclub deciding to cheat on each other; a couple slowly breaking up while they holiday; a young man who can’t stop himself from burning up all his money; another who reluctantly prepares his grandmother for her US citizenship test. In a voice that’s bare and wry, edgy and tender, Rahul Mehta writes of desire and family ties with rare candor. This is an outstanding debut.
Download or read book The Haunting of Hajji Hotak written by Jamil Jan Kochai and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-04-27 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A finalist for the National Book Award - a luminous new collection of stories from a young writer with 'a singular, resonant voice, an American teenager raised by Old World Afghan storytellers' (New York Times) **FINALIST FOR THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION** **SHORTLISTED FOR THE LA TIMES BOOK PRIZE FOR FICTION** **NAMED A BOOK OF THE YEAR 2022 BY THE NEW YORKER AND THE ATLANTIC** PEN/Hemingway finalist Jamil Jan Kochai breathes life into his contemporary Afghan characters, moving between modern-day Afghanistan and the Afghan diaspora in America. In these arresting stories verging on both comedy and tragedy, often starring young characters whose bravado is matched by their tenderness. In “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain,” a young man's video game experience turns into a surreal exploration on his own father's memories of war and occupation. Set in Kabul, “Return to Sender” follows two married doctors driven by guilt to leave the US and care for their fellow Afghans, even when their own son disappears. A college student in the US in “Hungry Ricky Daddy” starves himself in protest of Israeli violence against Palestine. And in the title story, “The Haunting of Hajji Hotak,” we learn the story of a man codenamed Hajji, from the perspective of a government surveillance worker, who becomes entrenched in the immigrant family's life. The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories is a moving exploration of characters grappling with the ghosts of war and displacement - and one that speaks to the immediate political landscape we reckon with today. 'An endlessly inventive and moving collection from a thrilling and capacious young talent' Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins. 'Kochai's short fiction defies expectations – readers' expectations of what a story should look like, and the story of a nation often told reductively and exclusively through media headlines' Guardian
Download or read book Maria Maria Other Stories written by Marytza K. Rubio and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2022-04-26 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conjuring entrancing tales of Mexican American mystics and misfits, Marytza K. Rubio shatters the boundaries of reality with this fiercely imaginative debut. “The first witch of the waters was born in Destruction. The moon named her Maria.” Set against the tropics and megacities of the Americas, Maria, Maria takes inspiration from wild creatures, tarot, and the porous borders between life and death. Motivated by love and its inverse, grief, the characters who inhabit these stories negotiate boldly with nature to cast their desired ends. As the enigmatic community college professor in “Brujería for Beginners” reminds us: “There’s always a price for conjuring in darkness. You won’t always know what it is until payment is due.” This commitment drives the disturbingly faithful widow in “Tijuca,” who promises to bury her husband’s head in the rich dirt of the jungle, and the sisters in “Moksha,” who are tempted by a sleek obsidian dagger once held by a vampiric idol. But magic isn’t limited to the women who wield it. As Rubio so brilliantly elucidates, animals are powerful magicians too. Subversive pigeons and hungry jaguars are called upon in “Tunnels,” and a lonely little girl runs free with a resurrected saber-toothed tiger in “Burial.” A colorful catalog of gallery exhibits from animals in therapy is featured in “Art Show,” including the Almost Philandering Fox, who longs after the red pelt of another, and the recently rehabilitated Paranoid Peacocks. Brimming with sharp wit and ferocious female intuition, these stories bubble over into the titular novella, “Maria, Maria”—a tropigoth family drama set in a reimagined California rainforest that explores the legacies of three Marias, and possibly all Marias. Writing in prose so lush it threatens to creep off the page, Rubio emerges as an ineffable new voice in contemporary short fiction.
Download or read book Best Barbarian Poems written by Roger Reeves and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2022-03-22 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize Winner of the 2023 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award Finalist for the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection, and the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Poetry A New York Times Notable Book “Terrific.… [Reeves] expands literary tradition so that new political ideas, self-revelation and play can thrive.” —Sandra Simonds, New York Times Book Review In his brilliant, expansive second volume, Whiting Award–winning poet Roger Reeves probes the apocalypses and raptures of humanity—climate change, anti-Black racism, familial and erotic love, ecstasy and loss. The poems in Best Barbarian roam across the literary and social landscape, from Beowulf’s Grendel to the jazz musician Alice Coltrane, from reckoning with immigration at the U.S.–Mexico border to thinking through the fraught beauty of the moon on a summer night after the police have killed a Black man. Daring and formally elegant, Best Barbarian asks the reader: “Who has not been an entryway shuddering in the wind / Of another’s want, a rose nailed to some dark longing and bled?” Reeves extends his inquiry into the work of writers who have come before, conversing with—and sometimes contradicting—Walt Whitman, James Baldwin, Sappho, Dante, and Aimé Césaire, among others. Expanding the tradition of poetry to reach from Gilgamesh and the Aeneid to Drake and Beyoncé, Reeves adds his voice to a long song that seeks to address itself “only to freedom.” Best Barbarian asks the reader to stay close as it plunges into catastrophe and finds surprising moments of joy and intimacy. This fearless, musical, and oracular collection announces Roger Reeves as an essential voice in American poetry.
Download or read book The O Henry Prize Stories 2018 written by Laura Furman and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018 contains twenty prize-winning stories chosen from thousands published in literary magazines over the previous year. The winning stories come from a mix of established writers and emerging voices, and are uniformly breathtaking. They are accompanied by essays from the eminent jurors on their favorites, observations from the winning writers on what inspired their stories, and an extensive resource list of magazines that publish short fiction. "The Tomb of Wrestling," Jo Ann Beard, Tin House "Counterblast," Marjorie Celona, The Southern Review "Nayla," Youmna Chlala, Prairie Schooner "Lucky Dragon," Viet Dinh, Ploughshares "Stop ’n’ Go," Michael Parker, New England Review "Past Perfect Continuous," Dounia Choukri, Chicago Quarterly Review "Inversion of Marcia," Thomas Bolt, n+1 "Nights in Logar," Jamil Jan Kochai, A Public Space "How We Eat," Mark Jude Poirier, Epoch "Deaf and Blind," Lara Vapnyar, The New Yorker "Why Were They Throwing Bricks?," Jenny Zhang, n+1 "An Amount of Discretion," Lauren Alwan, The Southern Review "Queen Elizabeth," Brad Felver, One Story "The Stamp Collector," Dave King, Fence "More or Less Like a Man," Michael Powers, The Threepenny Review "The Earth, Thy Great Exchequer, Ready Lies," Jo Lloyd, Zoetrope "Up Here," Tristan Hughes, Ploughshares "The Houses That Are Left Behind," Brenda Walker, The Kenyon Review "We Keep Them Anyway," Stephanie A. Vega, The Threepenny Review "Solstice," Anne Enright, The New Yorker Prize Jury for 2018: Fiona McFarlane, Ottessa Moshfegh, Elizabeth Tallent
Download or read book Caramelo written by Sandra Cisneros and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-04-30 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Every year, Ceyala “Lala” Reyes' family—aunts, uncles, mothers, fathers, and Lala's six older brothers—packs up three cars and, in a wild ride, drive from Chicago to the Little Grandfather and Awful Grandmother's house in Mexico City for the summer. From the celebrated bestselling author of The House on Mango Street and winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. Struggling to find a voice above the boom of her brothers and to understand her place on this side of the border and that, Lala is a shrewd observer of family life. But when she starts telling the Awful Grandmother's life story, seeking clues to how she got to be so awful, grandmother accuses Lala of exaggerating. Soon, a multigenerational family narrative turns into a whirlwind exploration of storytelling, lies, and life. Like the cherished rebozo, or shawl, that has been passed down through generations of Reyes women, Caramelo is alive with the vibrations of history, family, and love. From the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature.
Download or read book Bewilderness written by Karen Tucker and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2022-06-28 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in rural, poverty-stricken North Carolina, this "beautiful, gritty, and piercing" novel follows two young women—best friends—as they "journey through the highs and lows of friendship, love, and addiction," perfect for readers of Julie Buntin's Marlena (Erika Carter, author of Lucky You). Irene, a lonely nineteen-year-old in rural North Carolina, works long nights at the local pool hall, serving pitchers and dodging drunks. One evening, her hilarious, magnetic coworker Luce invites her on a joy ride through the mountains to take revenge on a particularly creepy customer. Their adventure not only spells the beginning of a dazzling friendship, it seduces both girls into the mysterious world of pills and the endless hustles needed to fund the next high. Together, Irene and Luce run nickel-tossing scams at the county fair and trick dealers into trading legit pharms for birth-control pills. Everything is wild and wonderful until Luce finds a boyfriend who wants to help her get clean. Soon the two of them decide to move away and start a new, sober life in Florida—leaving Irene behind. Told in a riveting dialogue between the girls' addicted past and their hopes for a better future, Bewilderness is not just a brilliant, funny, heartbreaking novel about opioid abuse, it's also a moving look at how intense, intimate friendships can shape every young woman's life.
Download or read book How to Write a Sentence written by Stanley Fish and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-01-25 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Bestseller “Both deeper and more democratic than The Elements of Style” —Adam Haslett, Financial Times “A guided tour through some of the most beautiful, arresting sentences in the English language.” —Slate In this entertaining and erudite gem, world-class professor and New York Times columnist Stanley Fish offers both sentence craft and sentence pleasure, skills invaluable to any writer (or reader). Like a seasoned sportscaster, Fish marvels at the adeptness of finely crafted sentences and breaks them down into digestible morsels, giving readers an instant play-by-play. Drawing on a wide range of great writers, from Philip Roth to Antonin Scalia to Jane Austen, How to Write a Sentence is much more than a writing manual—it is a spirited love letter to the written word, and a key to understanding how great writing works. It is a book that will stand the test of time.
Download or read book Unaccustomed Earth written by Jhumpa Lahiri and published by Random House India. This book was released on 2013-09-05 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The stories of Unaccustomed Earth focus on second-generation immigrants making and remaking lives, loves and identities in England and America. We follow brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, friends and lovers, in stories that take us from Boston and London to Bombay and Calcutta. Blending the individual and the generational, the exotic and the strikingly mundane, these haunting, exquisitely detailed and emotionally complex stories are intensely compelling elegies of life, death, love and fate. This is a dazzling work from a masterful writer.
Download or read book Farewell Fred Voodoo written by Amy Wilentz and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-01-08 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, this is a brilliant writer’s account of a long, painful, ecstatic—and unreciprocated—affair with a country that has long fascinated the world. A foreign correspondent on a simple story becomes, over time and in the pages of this book, a lover of Haiti, pursuing the heart of this beautiful and confounding land into its darkest corners and brightest clearings. Farewell, Fred Voodoo is a journey into the depths of the human soul as well as a vivid portrayal of the nation’s extraordinary people and their uncanny resilience. Haiti has found in Amy Wilentz an author of astonishing wit, sympathy, and eloquence.
Download or read book The Arsonists City written by Hala Alyan and published by Houghton Mifflin. This book was released on 2021 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Arsonists' City delivers all the pleasures of a good old-fashioned saga, but in Alyan's hands, one family's tale becomes the story of a nation--Lebanon and Syria, yes, but also the United States. It's the kind of book we are lucky to have."--Rumaan Alam A rich family story, a personal look at the legacy of war in the Middle East, and an indelible rendering of how we hold on to the people and places we call home The Nasr family is spread across the globe--Beirut, Brooklyn, Austin, the California desert. A Syrian mother, a Lebanese father, and three American children: all have lived a life of migration. Still, they've always had their ancestral home in Beirut--a constant touchstone--and the complicated, messy family love that binds them. But following his father's recent death, Idris, the family's new patriarch, has decided to sell. The decision brings the family to Beirut, where everyone unites against Idris in a fight to save the house. They all have secrets--lost loves, bitter jealousies, abandoned passions, deep-set shame--that distance has helped smother. But in a city smoldering with the legacy of war, an ongoing flow of refugees, religious tension, and political protest, those secrets ignite, imperiling the fragile ties that hold this family together. In a novel teeming with wisdom, warmth, and characters born of remarkable human insight, award-winning author Hala Alyan shows us again that "fiction is often the best filter for the real world around us" (NPR).
Download or read book The Beadworkers written by Beth Piatote and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beth Piatote's luminous debut collection opens with a feast, grounding its stories in the landscapes and lifeworlds of the Native Northwest, exploring the inventive and unforgettable pattern of Native American life in the contemporary world Told with humor, subtlety, and spareness, the mixed–genre works of Beth Piatote’s first collection find unifying themes in the strength of kinship, the pulse of longing, and the language of return. A woman teaches her niece to make a pair of beaded earrings while ruminating on a fractured relationship. An eleven–year–old girl narrates the unfolding of the Fish Wars in the 1960s as her family is propelled to its front lines. In 1890, as tensions escalate at Wounded Knee, two young men at college—one French and the other Lakota—each contemplate a death in the family. In the final, haunting piece, a Nez Perce–Cayuse family is torn apart as they debate the fate of ancestral remains in a moving revision of the Greek tragedy Antigone. Formally inventive and filled with vibrant characters, The Beadworkers draws on Indigenous aesthetics and forms to offer a powerful, sustaining vision of Native life.
Download or read book Things We Lost to the Water written by Eric Nguyen and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2022-04-26 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A captivating novel about an immigrant Vietnamese family who settles in New Orleans and struggles to remain connected to one another as their lives are inextricably reshaped. This stunning debut is "vast in scale and ambition, while luscious and inviting … in its intimacy” (The New York Times Book Review). When Huong arrives in New Orleans with her two young sons, she is jobless, homeless, and worried about her husband, Cong, who remains in Vietnam. As she and her boys begin to settle in to life in America, she continues to send letters and tapes back to Cong, hopeful that they will be reunited and her children will grow up with a father. But with time, Huong realizes she will never see her husband again. While she attempts to come to terms with this loss, her sons, Tuan and Binh, grow up in their absent father's shadow, haunted by a man and a country trapped in their memories and imaginations. As they push forward, the three adapt to life in America in different ways: Huong gets involved with a Vietnamese car salesman who is also new in town; Tuan tries to connect with his heritage by joining a local Vietnamese gang; and Binh, now going by Ben, embraces his adopted homeland and his burgeoning sexuality. Their search for identity--as individuals and as a family--threatens to tear them apart, until disaster strikes the city they now call home and they are suddenly forced to find a new way to come together and honor the ties that bind them.
Download or read book Seasons of Purgatory written by Shahriar Mandanipour and published by Bellevue Literary Press. This book was released on 2022-01-25 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BOOK AWARD LONGLIST The first English-language story collection from “one of Iran’s most important living fiction writers” (Guardian), “a playful, whip-smart literary conjuror: a Kundera or Rushdie of post-Khomeini Iran” (Wall Street Journal) In Seasons of Purgatory, the fantastical and the visceral merge in tales of tender desire and collective violence, the boredom and brutality of war, and the clash of modern urban life and rural traditions. Mandanipour, banned from publication in his native Iran, vividly renders the individual consciousness in extremis from a variety of perspectives: young and old, man and woman, conscript and prisoner. While delivering a ferocious social critique, these stories are steeped in the poetry and stark beauty of an ancient land and culture.
Download or read book The Haunting of Maddy Clare written by Simone St. James and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-10-04 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A woman of limited means and even less experience must confront a vengeful spirit in this haunting novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Broken Girls and The Sun Down Motel. 1920s England. Sarah Piper’s lonely, threadbare existence changes when her temporary agency sends her to assist an obsessed ghost hunter. Alistair Gellis—rich, handsome, and scarred by World War I—has been summoned to investigate the spirit of the nineteen-year-old maid Maddy Clare, who is said to haunt the barn where she committed suicide. Maddy hated men in life, and she will not speak to them in death. But Sarah is unprepared to confront an angry ghost—real or imagined—on her own. She’s even less prepared for the arrival of Alistair’s associate, rough, unsettling Matthew Ryder, also a veteran of the trenches, whose scars go deeper than Sarah can reach. Soon, Sarah is caught up in a desperate struggle. For Maddy’s ghost is no hoax—she’s real, she’s angry, and she has powers that defy all reason. Now, Sarah and Matthew must discover who Maddy was, where she came from, and what is driving her desire for vengeance—before she destroys them all....
