Winner of the 2017 American Book Award
Winner of the 2017 PEN Oakland Award
Winner of the 2017 Story Prize Spotlight Award
One of the 25 Best Short Story Collections of 2016, Electric Literature
Most Anticipated Books of 2016, The Millions
A Key Collection for Fall 2016, Library Journal
"[A] brave, bright, tell-it-like-it-is collection…. Impressively varied in style and content, Jarrar’s collection is recommended for a wide range of readers.”
—Library Journal
“Sharp and irreverent.... When Jarrar’s sense of humor tangles with her character’s feelings of estrangement, the results are often charming and funny.”
—Los Angeles Times
"Jarrar follows up her novel, A Map of Home, with a collection of stories depicting the lives of Arab women, ranging from hypnotic fables to gritty realism…. Often witty and cutting, these stories transport readers and introduce them to a memorable group of women."
—Publishers Weekly
"A subtle interrogation of class spanning multiple generations and an exploration of desire enlivened by a dash of magical realism."
—Kirkus Reviews
"The thirteen stories in this collection blend humor with rage, wit with pathos. Jarrar presents an astonishing variety, each story as inventive as it is insightful. It’s a book for this oppressive electoral season, where presidential politics are ugly and destructive, and demagoguery is endeavoring to trample a core American truth: Our country’s strength derives from open borders. Jarrar is here with a correction."
—The Millions
"Funny and darkly imaginative…. The stories are confessional and riveting by means of the deeply intimate and vulnerable spaces Jarrar’s characters allow us to access…. Jarrar’s fiction has exciting range, and she investigates narrative as well as social taboo. Even when her often-fantastical stories veer towards fable, she subverts any expectation of threadbare fairy tale, always finding affecting depths…. Like the tightrope walker in the opening story, Jarrar pulls off incredible feats again and again.”
—The Portland Mercury
"These stories showcase the strength and talent of a writer of immeasurable gift and grace, who confronts the poignant and often brutal realities her characters face with sass and verve."
—Los Angeles Review of Books
“Jarrar...manages to imbue her stories and characters with unabashed satire and biting language, melded with an expansive, imaginative geography…. In this new, beautifully crafted collection she moves seamlessly from Istanbul to Sydney to Seattle, with stories featuring colourful characters from a variety of Arab backgrounds…. This endearing book, and its vulnerable characters, indelibly leaves the reader with an intimate sense of love and loss."
—The National (UAE)
"Jarrar’s style—sensitive, peculiar, and closely observed—[has] roots in Russian literature, but its rhythm sounds modern and entirely her own. Her best descriptions are about relationships and the details we observe in the people we kind of hate but mostly love.… Weird, hilarious, melodramatic, gorgeous, and sincerely resonant."
—Electric Literature
"Jarrar’s work seeks to expand literary representation of Arab people, and her stories take place in cities and countries all over the world.... Bold, wry stories depicting the lives of (mostly) Arab men and women, from Cairo to New York to Palestine to Sydney to Istanbul."
—Signature, "10 Worldwide Rad Women Writers You Should Know"
"This collection of stories explores an array of Muslim voices spanning several cities and continents, all focusing on seeking freedom and love amid displacement and loss.... These voices and experiences need to be heard now more than ever."
—Fodor'sTravel, "Fodor's Holiday Gift Guide 2016"
"As a queer, Muslim, Palestinian-American and proud fat femme, Jarrar lives the complexities of intersectionality. Fortunately for her readers, she infuses those complexities into her characters…. She shows their connections and differences by leaving no topic unexplored—class, language, and sexuality are all at the core of the book. Her style is straightforward and direct while being multifaceted and thought-provoking.”
—Bitch Media
"Randa Jarrar does what every brave story-teller should do—she makes sense of what other writers leave outside the bounds. She connects us with that which others have left unsaid."
—Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin and Transatlantic
“Him, Me, Muhammad Ali is a searing collection of short stories about loving, lusting, losing, and surviving. Randa Jarrar is one of the finest writers of her generation. Her voice is assured, fiercely independent, laced with humor and irony—and always, always, honest.”
—Laila Lalami, author of The Moor’s Account and The Secret Son
“Randa Jarrar’s prose is bold and luscious and makes the darkly comic seem light. The voices in Him, Me, Muhammad Ali are powerful individually and overwhelming as a chorus. This wonderful work isn’t just a collection; it’s a world.”
—Mat Johnson, author of Pym and Loving Day
“These vibrant, funny, earthy, and above all, yearning (for love, for family, for home) stories are a revelation. Jarrar combines the invention of Calvino, the sprung style of Paley, the poetic imagery of Babel....But that mash-up isn’t mere stylistic exuberance; it’s a restless, relentless and deeply affecting effort to forge identity out of fragments, to make a whole out of halves. These are the stories we need right now.”
—Peter Ho Davies, author of The Welsh Girl and The Ugliest House in the World
“The stories of Randa Jarrar are fearless, funny, and sad, soaring and earthly, fable-like and visceral, full of families, lovers, friends, strangers and lonely children. These stories laugh with and think through and rise against, which is just to say they brilliantly demonstrate Jarrar’s huge talent, compassion and range. Him, Me, Muhammed Ali astonishes from start to finish.”
—Sam Lipsyte, author of Venus Drive, The Ask, and The Fun Parts
09/01/2016
You have to hand it to Jarrar, author of the Arab-American Book Award winner A Map of Home; the heroines in her brave, bright, tell-it-like-it-is collection are generally not submissive. When forced, the sharp-tongued unwed mother who narrates "Lost in Freakin' Yonkers" chooses her baby over her traditional family; the heroine of "Building Girls" may work for her parents in Egypt, knowing she'll never leave, but she finds an imam who declares, "Nothing in the Koran says a woman can't love a woman." Elsewhere, a girl in Alexandria aims (literally and figuratively) to reach the moon, another in Paramus, NJ, gets kidnapped from a Pathmark, a kestrel found in Turkey with an Israeli tag tells its story, and a college graduate contends with a famed Egyptian feminist. VERDICT Impressively varied in style and content, Jarrar's collection is recommended for a wide range of readers.
2016-07-19
Debut collection from the award-winning author of A Map of Home (2008).“The Lunatics’ Eclipse” is a fable about a girl who wants the moon and a boy who builds a rocket. “How Can I Be of Use to You?” is a sly interrogation of the ways in which women are exploited, particularly by each other. “Lost in Freakin’ Yonkers” is a desperate, foulmouthed rant by a young Egyptian-American woman pregnant with a drunk loser’s baby. These stories are set in locations geographically as disparate as Cairo and Paramus, New Jersey. “A Sailor” is a carefully controlled exercise in very short fiction, while “Grace” is a weird tale that gets a bit Borges-ian toward the end. Many of the stories gathered here have been published already—some more than once—in a range of literary journals, including such prestigious outlets as Ploughshares and Guernica. This variety is impressive, but it doesn’t necessarily make for a satisfying reading experience. Taken as a whole, these stories feel like a series of experiments—or assignments—consistent only insofar as they share a certain superficiality. Jarrar lived in Kuwait and Egypt before moving to the U.S. as a teenager, and much of her work turns on a clash of cultures. Unfortunately, in most instances, this dynamic dichotomy is the whole story. An author is not obligated to resolve the conflicts she sets up, but Jarrar seldom sticks around long enough to explore the results of the conditions she creates. In this regard, most of these stories seem unfinished. “Building Girls” is an exception. This is a subtle interrogation of class spanning multiple generations and an exploration of desire enlivened by a dash of magical realism. A record of an author finding her voice.
