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Him, Me, Muhammad Ali
Award-winning novelist Randa Jarrar's new story collection moves seamlessly between realism and fable, history and the present, capturing the lives of Muslim women and men across myriad geographies and circumstances. With acerbic wit, deep tenderness, and boundless imagination, Jarrar brings to life a memorable cast of characters, many of them "accidental transients"—a term for migratory birds who have gone astray—seeking their circuitous routes back home. Fierce and feeling, Him, Me, Muhammad Ali is a testament to survival in the face of love, loss, and displacement.
Randa Jarrar is the author of a highly successful novel, A Map of Home, which received an Arab-American Book Award and was named one of the best novels of 2008 by the Barnes & Noble Review. She grew up in Kuwait and Egypt, and moved to the United States after the first Gulf War. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Utne Reader, Salon.com, Guernica, the Rumpus, the Oxford American, Ploughshares, and more. She blogs for Salon, and lives in California.
Randa Jarrar is the author of a highly successful novel, A Map of Home, which received an Arab-American Book Award and was named one of the best novels of 2008 by the Barnes & Noble Review. She grew up in Kuwait and Egypt, and moved to the United States after the first Gulf War. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Utne Reader, Salon.com, Guernica, the Rumpus, the Oxford American, Ploughshares, and more. She blogs for Salon, and lives in California.
208 pages, Hardcover
First published October 11, 2016
16 people are currently reading
1905 people want to read
About the author
Randa Jarrar
13 books386 followersRanda Jarrar is a Palestinian-American author, translator, performer, and professor.
Jarrar's first novel, the coming-of-age story A Map of Home (2008), won her the Hopwood Award, and an Arab American Book Award. Since then she has published short stories, essays in a number of anthologies and collections as well as her short story collection, Him, Me, Muhammad Ali (2016), and her memoir, Love Is an Ex-Country (2021).
Jarrar was born in 1978 in Chicago, to an Egyptian mother and a Palestinian father. She grew up in Kuwait and Egypt. After the Gulf War in 1991, she and her family returned to the United States, living in the New York area.
Jarrar studied creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College, receiving an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Texas at Austin, and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan.
She is a creative writing professor at California State University. Of her writing, author and critic Mat Johnson has said “Randa Jarrar’s prose is bold and luscious and makes the darkly comic seem light."
Jarrar's first novel, the coming-of-age story A Map of Home (2008), won her the Hopwood Award, and an Arab American Book Award. Since then she has published short stories, essays in a number of anthologies and collections as well as her short story collection, Him, Me, Muhammad Ali (2016), and her memoir, Love Is an Ex-Country (2021).
Jarrar was born in 1978 in Chicago, to an Egyptian mother and a Palestinian father. She grew up in Kuwait and Egypt. After the Gulf War in 1991, she and her family returned to the United States, living in the New York area.
Jarrar studied creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College, receiving an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Texas at Austin, and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan.
She is a creative writing professor at California State University. Of her writing, author and critic Mat Johnson has said “Randa Jarrar’s prose is bold and luscious and makes the darkly comic seem light."
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August 16, 2022I was completely immersed in these stories and there wasn't a single in the collection I didn't like. My favorites were "Lost in Freakin' Yonkers" and "The Life, Loves, and Adventures of Zelwa the Halfie." I loved Jarrar's writing and will be quick to read more of her work.
May 14, 2022
Che bella questa raccolta
Dei racconti ben scritti mi colpisce sempre la capacitá di cambiare registro, punto di vista, e impostazione di scrittura nel giro di poche pagine.
Consigliatissimo
Dei racconti ben scritti mi colpisce sempre la capacitá di cambiare registro, punto di vista, e impostazione di scrittura nel giro di poche pagine.
Consigliatissimo
June 7, 2018
Different and delicious.
Yes some books can be deliciously interesting, which provide some new taste to the reader. In this case, writer's unique and witty style, variation of issues makes this collection of short stories worth reading.
If you want to know contemporary Arab thought affected by changes across Middle East during last hundred years and about Arab immigrants to west through fiction, then this is an appropriate book to start with.
Yes some books can be deliciously interesting, which provide some new taste to the reader. In this case, writer's unique and witty style, variation of issues makes this collection of short stories worth reading.
If you want to know contemporary Arab thought affected by changes across Middle East during last hundred years and about Arab immigrants to west through fiction, then this is an appropriate book to start with.
August 12, 2017
Jarrar has incredible talent in taking on the perspective of various protagonist identities, all of them complex and intersectional across ethnicity, gender, geography, and history, and with varying loyalties to their practice of Islam. She takes on identities both realist and fantastic (including a part-woman, part-ibex -- a metaphoric exploration of biracial identity) with compelling artistry. My frustration, which is completely on me, is that the short story format always leaves me hungry for more; just as I'm getting the lay of the land, the story ends and a new one begins. What I love most is her willingness to unapologetically give Muslim women their sexuality -- not something you find often, even in contemporary literature.
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October 12, 2016Here's my book review in The Millions. http://www.themillions.com/2016/10/op...
To Open Borders: ‘Him, Me, Muhammad Ali’
By Martha Anne Toll posted at 6:00 am on October 11, 2016 0
cover
coverIf you haven’t read Randa Jarrar, it’s time to. Jarrar’s debut novel, A Map of Home, introduced her as a smart and funny/not-so-funny writer. Jarrar grew up in Kuwait and Egypt, the daughter of an Egyptian-Greek mother and Palestinian father. She moved to the United States after the first Gulf War. A Map of Home is a coming of age story about Nidali, a girl with similar background to the author’s, who lands in Texas after migrating through various parts of the Middle East. Laced with family antics — affectionate and keenly observed — A Map of Home is an immigrant story with kick. Here’s Nidali, just off the plane in Texas:
I looked out the car’s window, mesmerized by the highway. Cars stayed in their lanes. They stopped at traffic lights; here, those red and yellow and green circles were not mere suggestions or street decorations….A woman was crossing the street and no one appeared to offer her luscious love bone.
We arrived at our new home, a long narrow house that was a little off the ground. You had to take three big steps to stand on its front porch. It was on a short dirt road…lined here and there, and here again, with cans of Lone Star. This must by the soda they drink here, I thought.
coverAlia Malek’s A Country Called Amreeka uses nonfiction to tell the story of Arab immigration to America over the last century. Malek profiles a series of individuals — an Alabama football player in the Jim Crow South, a politician giving voice to Arab American constituents, a gay man who has to navigate bi-culturally — each an immigrant “success,” each quintessentially American. A Map of Home deploys fiction similarly; it offers a fresh lens on the immigrant experience so core to being American. In an interview with Beirut39, Jarrar said, “Texas kind of reminds me of an Arab country in America where everyone speaks Spanish instead of Arabic. I like the approximation in culture.” That approximation is deftly illustrated in her debut novel.
If A Map of Home travels from Kuwait to Texas with humor and wit, Jarrar’s forthcoming short story collection, Him, Me, Muhammad Ali, paints with an even broader brush. With compelling themes of displacement and reinvention, these stories push boundaries — probing race, class, sexual identity, and family; the role of women in Arab and American culture; and much more. In this collection, mythology meets reality, and Jarrar’s palette spans the world.
The stories are full of pithy asides. Describing a mentorship with an imperious and mesmerizing Egyptian feminist in “How Can I Be of Use to You?” the narrator wants to hitchhike “back to my family — to their familiar oppression and their unspoken support.” In “Grace,” a heartbreaking story worthy of Borges, a seven-year-old girl is kidnapped from a Pathmark in Paramus, renamed Grace, and raised by a female commune. She plays with a doll that she convinces herself is a “still and shrunken Ida,” her little sister. She is never found. As an adult, however, she discovers that Ida has written a novel that precisely describes her captivity.
It hurt me that Ida could have found me and not reached out to me. But I guessed we were even. Still I felt angry that she imagined me as a lonely old hag, still imprisoned….
Each night, before I go to sleep, I picture myself driving to our old house. I imagine Ida waiting for me by the staircase, still a child…. We run through the empty house, no one there but us, stopping in the vast, wooden den. And there Ida asks me where I’ve been, and I tell her: that I’d been taken away by those who wanted to share a life with me, that I’d been quickly kidnapped by love.
There’s boy trouble and religion trouble. In “Lost in Freakin’ Yonkers,” the narrator is thrown out of her home, pregnant and single:
When you’re disowned, your mother becomes your secret lover, calling you from pay phones, visiting at odd hours and for short bits of time. And your lover becomes your mother, has to take care of you now that she’s gone.
Despite her mother’s urging, the narrator is not interested in trying to convert the father of her child — “He’ll be shitty Muslim and a shitty husband too.” She drives home with the drunken boyfriend after the birth, “a ton of shit going on inside my head.”
This is it? I ask myself, hating the government and financial rules, my reproductive system, his big dick, and mostly, my God. Not just God, but the God, the one who wrote the book resting in the car-door pocket on my left, the book that my boyfriend erroneously skims from left to right, the book that provides Guilt big enough to make me want to marry this ape with several mental illnesses he does not plan on addressing any time soon.
Politics are never far below the surface. “Testimony of Malik, Prisoner #287690” is written in the form of a report from Istanbul describing a kestrel named Malik Kareem Aziz El-Hajj Aamer Kan’un found in a “nearby village with Israeli tag on claw and placed under arrest…We believe the small falcon is a spy.” Interrogated by a series of Commanders, the kestrel says
As a child, I saw the bodies of collaborators hung from the lines my kin and I used to hunt from. Their bodies swayed. The punishment for spying was always death. And death never appealed to me….
One day, while I was en route to the sea, I saw the bigger birds, the warplanes, hovering far above me. The plane urinated a white phosphorous that clouded the air I flew in, and soon I was in the sea.
coverThe kestrel is captured by university students in Tel Aviv, investigated, and tagged. “In Aqraba, everyone was angry with me for being captured by the Israelis.” He falls in love with a gull from Istanbul. “She said we could never breed, because I was not one of them.” The final transmission from Prisoner #287690’s recording chip is one of longing and displacement: “I am too elderly to fly home now. I want to return to Aqraba, to say goodbye, not to those who have shunned me, but to my land, to the olive trees, the earth, and the cicadas.” (Are birds a current stand-in for grief and rage? Max Porter’s new novel, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, substitutes a crow for a nanny/grief counselor following the death of a young mother.)
Jarrar’s title story opens with the death of the narrator’s father from a brain aneurysm “on the Metro-North train from White Plains to Grand Central; his fellow commuters didn’t notice until Scarsdale.” The narrator is the daughter of a transcontinental marriage between two journalists — a Black American man and an Egyptian woman from Sydney — who meet at the Ali-Foreman fight in Zaire.
After their engagement, my parents wrote their respective stories on the plane and filed them from Cairo, then took the Egypt Rail to Alexandria. My dad exaggeratedly said he was pissing out of his ass the entire ride over. In Alexandria, he was greeted as family, converted to Islam a week later, and married my mum in the front hall of her apartment building.
She left my dad and moved back to Sydney before I turned one. I never knew why, but suspected…that he’d cheated on her.
Everyone in Sydney treated me like an Egyptian kid. I looked like one of them, and nobody mentioned my Black dad.
The narrator recalls being the victim of racist epithets, remarking that her Mom was good at hiding things. “The whole time she was my mother,” Jarrar writes, suggesting that the connection was temporary, “I assumed she never got laid or even dated, but I was mistaken.” Again, there is deracination, complex family relationships, and humor that telegraphs heartache.
coverJarrar channels Isaac Babel in “The Story of My Building” and in the final story covers territory reminiscent of Moacyr Scliar’s The Centaur in the Garden (about a centaur born to a Jewish family in Brazil). “The Life, Loves, and Adventures of Zelwa the Halfie” is the tale of a “half woman — the upper half — and half Transjordanian ibex.” If ever there was an allegory of an outsider, this is it.
Ibex were once the supermodels of the Near East, where our fine likeness were painted on vases and water jugs, our horns curling back like shells. Sadly, I do not have horns…but I am horny. As you can imagine, though, I have been single for a while.
Nowadays, when I go on dates, I drive my disability-equipped van, which allows me to accelerate with my hands and provides my lower body lots of room. But when I was younger, I used to show up at dates’ doors, carry them on my back, and gallop off to dinner. This was a problem because it created an intense and too-premature sense of intimacy.
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.
To Open Borders: ‘Him, Me, Muhammad Ali’
By Martha Anne Toll posted at 6:00 am on October 11, 2016 0
cover
coverIf you haven’t read Randa Jarrar, it’s time to. Jarrar’s debut novel, A Map of Home, introduced her as a smart and funny/not-so-funny writer. Jarrar grew up in Kuwait and Egypt, the daughter of an Egyptian-Greek mother and Palestinian father. She moved to the United States after the first Gulf War. A Map of Home is a coming of age story about Nidali, a girl with similar background to the author’s, who lands in Texas after migrating through various parts of the Middle East. Laced with family antics — affectionate and keenly observed — A Map of Home is an immigrant story with kick. Here’s Nidali, just off the plane in Texas:
I looked out the car’s window, mesmerized by the highway. Cars stayed in their lanes. They stopped at traffic lights; here, those red and yellow and green circles were not mere suggestions or street decorations….A woman was crossing the street and no one appeared to offer her luscious love bone.
We arrived at our new home, a long narrow house that was a little off the ground. You had to take three big steps to stand on its front porch. It was on a short dirt road…lined here and there, and here again, with cans of Lone Star. This must by the soda they drink here, I thought.
coverAlia Malek’s A Country Called Amreeka uses nonfiction to tell the story of Arab immigration to America over the last century. Malek profiles a series of individuals — an Alabama football player in the Jim Crow South, a politician giving voice to Arab American constituents, a gay man who has to navigate bi-culturally — each an immigrant “success,” each quintessentially American. A Map of Home deploys fiction similarly; it offers a fresh lens on the immigrant experience so core to being American. In an interview with Beirut39, Jarrar said, “Texas kind of reminds me of an Arab country in America where everyone speaks Spanish instead of Arabic. I like the approximation in culture.” That approximation is deftly illustrated in her debut novel.
If A Map of Home travels from Kuwait to Texas with humor and wit, Jarrar’s forthcoming short story collection, Him, Me, Muhammad Ali, paints with an even broader brush. With compelling themes of displacement and reinvention, these stories push boundaries — probing race, class, sexual identity, and family; the role of women in Arab and American culture; and much more. In this collection, mythology meets reality, and Jarrar’s palette spans the world.
The stories are full of pithy asides. Describing a mentorship with an imperious and mesmerizing Egyptian feminist in “How Can I Be of Use to You?” the narrator wants to hitchhike “back to my family — to their familiar oppression and their unspoken support.” In “Grace,” a heartbreaking story worthy of Borges, a seven-year-old girl is kidnapped from a Pathmark in Paramus, renamed Grace, and raised by a female commune. She plays with a doll that she convinces herself is a “still and shrunken Ida,” her little sister. She is never found. As an adult, however, she discovers that Ida has written a novel that precisely describes her captivity.
It hurt me that Ida could have found me and not reached out to me. But I guessed we were even. Still I felt angry that she imagined me as a lonely old hag, still imprisoned….
Each night, before I go to sleep, I picture myself driving to our old house. I imagine Ida waiting for me by the staircase, still a child…. We run through the empty house, no one there but us, stopping in the vast, wooden den. And there Ida asks me where I’ve been, and I tell her: that I’d been taken away by those who wanted to share a life with me, that I’d been quickly kidnapped by love.
There’s boy trouble and religion trouble. In “Lost in Freakin’ Yonkers,” the narrator is thrown out of her home, pregnant and single:
When you’re disowned, your mother becomes your secret lover, calling you from pay phones, visiting at odd hours and for short bits of time. And your lover becomes your mother, has to take care of you now that she’s gone.
Despite her mother’s urging, the narrator is not interested in trying to convert the father of her child — “He’ll be shitty Muslim and a shitty husband too.” She drives home with the drunken boyfriend after the birth, “a ton of shit going on inside my head.”
This is it? I ask myself, hating the government and financial rules, my reproductive system, his big dick, and mostly, my God. Not just God, but the God, the one who wrote the book resting in the car-door pocket on my left, the book that my boyfriend erroneously skims from left to right, the book that provides Guilt big enough to make me want to marry this ape with several mental illnesses he does not plan on addressing any time soon.
Politics are never far below the surface. “Testimony of Malik, Prisoner #287690” is written in the form of a report from Istanbul describing a kestrel named Malik Kareem Aziz El-Hajj Aamer Kan’un found in a “nearby village with Israeli tag on claw and placed under arrest…We believe the small falcon is a spy.” Interrogated by a series of Commanders, the kestrel says
As a child, I saw the bodies of collaborators hung from the lines my kin and I used to hunt from. Their bodies swayed. The punishment for spying was always death. And death never appealed to me….
One day, while I was en route to the sea, I saw the bigger birds, the warplanes, hovering far above me. The plane urinated a white phosphorous that clouded the air I flew in, and soon I was in the sea.
coverThe kestrel is captured by university students in Tel Aviv, investigated, and tagged. “In Aqraba, everyone was angry with me for being captured by the Israelis.” He falls in love with a gull from Istanbul. “She said we could never breed, because I was not one of them.” The final transmission from Prisoner #287690’s recording chip is one of longing and displacement: “I am too elderly to fly home now. I want to return to Aqraba, to say goodbye, not to those who have shunned me, but to my land, to the olive trees, the earth, and the cicadas.” (Are birds a current stand-in for grief and rage? Max Porter’s new novel, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, substitutes a crow for a nanny/grief counselor following the death of a young mother.)
Jarrar’s title story opens with the death of the narrator’s father from a brain aneurysm “on the Metro-North train from White Plains to Grand Central; his fellow commuters didn’t notice until Scarsdale.” The narrator is the daughter of a transcontinental marriage between two journalists — a Black American man and an Egyptian woman from Sydney — who meet at the Ali-Foreman fight in Zaire.
After their engagement, my parents wrote their respective stories on the plane and filed them from Cairo, then took the Egypt Rail to Alexandria. My dad exaggeratedly said he was pissing out of his ass the entire ride over. In Alexandria, he was greeted as family, converted to Islam a week later, and married my mum in the front hall of her apartment building.
She left my dad and moved back to Sydney before I turned one. I never knew why, but suspected…that he’d cheated on her.
Everyone in Sydney treated me like an Egyptian kid. I looked like one of them, and nobody mentioned my Black dad.
The narrator recalls being the victim of racist epithets, remarking that her Mom was good at hiding things. “The whole time she was my mother,” Jarrar writes, suggesting that the connection was temporary, “I assumed she never got laid or even dated, but I was mistaken.” Again, there is deracination, complex family relationships, and humor that telegraphs heartache.
coverJarrar channels Isaac Babel in “The Story of My Building” and in the final story covers territory reminiscent of Moacyr Scliar’s The Centaur in the Garden (about a centaur born to a Jewish family in Brazil). “The Life, Loves, and Adventures of Zelwa the Halfie” is the tale of a “half woman — the upper half — and half Transjordanian ibex.” If ever there was an allegory of an outsider, this is it.
Ibex were once the supermodels of the Near East, where our fine likeness were painted on vases and water jugs, our horns curling back like shells. Sadly, I do not have horns…but I am horny. As you can imagine, though, I have been single for a while.
Nowadays, when I go on dates, I drive my disability-equipped van, which allows me to accelerate with my hands and provides my lower body lots of room. But when I was younger, I used to show up at dates’ doors, carry them on my back, and gallop off to dinner. This was a problem because it created an intense and too-premature sense of intimacy.
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.
February 8, 2025
DNF, it’s just giving stupid
I regret spending money on this
Ruined my day fr
I regret spending money on this
Ruined my day fr
June 12, 2019
I seem to be the odd one out and did not enjoy this short story collection. I very much like reading from the perspective of an Arab women and how she sees the world, the writing wasn’t the issue so much as the crassness. I really had a problem with the third story and by the fifth knew this wasn’t for me. How many stories need to include masturbating. DNF’d at 50% . I gave three stars but I think it’s a two star for me. The extra star is because there just are not enough books in the mainstream from women of Arab countries. If you didn’t show me the authors name I would have rated it only the two stars and DNF’d it a lot sooner.
February 7, 2017
All the stories were remarkable and unforgettable but "Lost in Freakin' Yonkers", "A Frame for the Sky", "The Life, Loves, and Adventures of Zelwa the Halfie" were my favourites. I can't to read more from this author.
March 4, 2018
Reality portayed through fantasy in Jarrar's collection of short stories. Picturing present situations through metaphorical figures and symbols made it a pleasant and interesting read. Best stories were: Building Girls and Asmahan, both telling the story of the special bonds between women.
May 28, 2022
Ogni racconto è un mondo, un microcosmo. La maggior parte dellə protagonistə è femmina, ma ci sono anche un falco e due uomini. L'ultimo è uno dei miei preferiti, ho adorato che fosse in chiusura del libro! Penso che ogni tanto ne rileggerò qualche pagina ♡
December 20, 2016
One of my favorite books of 2016!
July 15, 2017
A very talented writer. The stories were so sad and depressing, though.
February 13, 2017
loved how imaginative her stories are, remarkable how she could write from so many different perspectives, and what a sense of humor!
February 22, 2017
Excellent, all-around.
April 15, 2017
One can make comparisons with the style (Bender, Diaz), but no comparison can be made with the perspective, and that's the book's greatest strength.
January 2, 2018
Decent collection of short stories - some were amazing, others were so so.
July 14, 2018
So good. Loved.
November 30, 2020
Collection of short stories by an Arab-American author. It took me a while to get into it, because I struggled to find a through-line in the introductory stories. The collection is broken into three parts, and I couldn't really figure out why; in my opinion, Part 3 was the strongest and most cohesive.
To me, the best stories were:
Lost in Freakin' Yonkers - snapshots during the pregnancy of teen girl whose family disowns her for keeping the baby and not marrying the father.
Grace - ohhhhh but it so creeped me out - about a child who is kidnapped from the grocery store, and raised in a commune
Him, Me, Muhammad Ali - a young woman goes back to Egypt after her father's death in an attempt to fulfill his wish of having his ashes scattered in his home country. I thought the device of the title with this one was clever.
The Story of My Building - about the social gatherings of the men and women in one boy's family, and how the children entertain themselves, and what happens when the building is bombed.
The Life, Loves and Adventures of Zelwa the Halfie - about a woman who is half ibex, whose father wants her to have surgery to become fully human, and the discovery of family secrets
I have other books by Jarrar on my TBR list, and I'm looking forward to seeing if maybe I connect better overall with some of her other writing.
To me, the best stories were:
Lost in Freakin' Yonkers - snapshots during the pregnancy of teen girl whose family disowns her for keeping the baby and not marrying the father.
Grace - ohhhhh but it so creeped me out - about a child who is kidnapped from the grocery store, and raised in a commune
Him, Me, Muhammad Ali - a young woman goes back to Egypt after her father's death in an attempt to fulfill his wish of having his ashes scattered in his home country. I thought the device of the title with this one was clever.
The Story of My Building - about the social gatherings of the men and women in one boy's family, and how the children entertain themselves, and what happens when the building is bombed.
The Life, Loves and Adventures of Zelwa the Halfie - about a woman who is half ibex, whose father wants her to have surgery to become fully human, and the discovery of family secrets
I have other books by Jarrar on my TBR list, and I'm looking forward to seeing if maybe I connect better overall with some of her other writing.
December 1, 2019
honestly this took me so long to finish i don't really remember what i thought of the stories? i read zalwa the halfie last night and liked it though and obviously enjoyed the collection enough to make it through so 3 stars
February 8, 2019
If there's a book for displaced and Nomadic peoples of our generation, then this is it. Jarrar's characters beautifully narrate the pain and heartache of being stuck between different cultures, worlds and lives. She manages to capture the incessant feeling that each of us has that the 'other' with a life completely opposite to ours, is better off.
Each short story ends with a pang. Like being punched in the gut, you know that this person, whose life you had a fleeting peek into, will now carry on without you. The feeling reminds me of an entry in the dictionary of obscure sorrows; sonder - the realisation that each person you encounter has a life as complex as your own.
This book is to me, so reminiscent of Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders. It's an education in everything from extreme poverty in Egypt to the disparity between class and money within the country, and the lives of Egyptians living in America. I can't help but wonder how much time she spent in Egypt growing up - she so perfectly weaves the tales and characters of Egyptians who have never left the village they grew up in, as well as those with Egyptian background who go back for the first time as adults and can't help but feel like outsiders in the 'home' they have longed for.
A book to be read and reread for many years.
Each short story ends with a pang. Like being punched in the gut, you know that this person, whose life you had a fleeting peek into, will now carry on without you. The feeling reminds me of an entry in the dictionary of obscure sorrows; sonder - the realisation that each person you encounter has a life as complex as your own.
This book is to me, so reminiscent of Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders. It's an education in everything from extreme poverty in Egypt to the disparity between class and money within the country, and the lives of Egyptians living in America. I can't help but wonder how much time she spent in Egypt growing up - she so perfectly weaves the tales and characters of Egyptians who have never left the village they grew up in, as well as those with Egyptian background who go back for the first time as adults and can't help but feel like outsiders in the 'home' they have longed for.
A book to be read and reread for many years.
October 27, 2016
Randa Jarrar's short story collection HIM, ME, MUHAMMAD ALI is full of dark twisty characters; she's an Arab American Roald Dahl (like his collection SKIN and other stories, their worlds are whimsical yet treacherous). Her lively staccato use of language is the perfect foil to this darkness, keeping the reader suspended and engaged throughout. It never plods. Never holds your hand to the fire for longer than a few seconds at a time. The title story HIM, ME, MUHAMMAD ALI is one of the strongest stories in the collection, interweaving ancestry and tradition with contemporary conflict. There's not a minaret in sight. Not even on the cover.
Her story, A SAILOR, is about a husband who refuses to become angry at his wife for having an affair. It's short. It's intense. It's unrelenting. It's heartbreaking. And yah--if you don't like curse words, this ain't for you. I like curse words done well. She does it well.
Her story, A SAILOR, is about a husband who refuses to become angry at his wife for having an affair. It's short. It's intense. It's unrelenting. It's heartbreaking. And yah--if you don't like curse words, this ain't for you. I like curse words done well. She does it well.
April 16, 2017
I received this book from GR Giveaways and I'm grateful for that.
This collection of 13 short stories is completely incomparable. Jarrar's writing is innovative, bold, bittersweet, and witty. I found reading this book to be refreshing as well as challenging in the best way--I had to stretch outside the usual confines and expectations.
Here she breaks new ground with a twist and spin. Where else could stories include jokes about a vibrator and a half-human, half-ibex person? The characters and situations are not the usual. My favorite stories were: "The Lunatics' Eclipse," "Building Girls," "Grace," "A Frame of the Sky," and "The Life, Loves, and Adventures of Zelwa the Halfie."
Her 'A Map of Home' book is another good read. I'd readily read her next book.
This collection of 13 short stories is completely incomparable. Jarrar's writing is innovative, bold, bittersweet, and witty. I found reading this book to be refreshing as well as challenging in the best way--I had to stretch outside the usual confines and expectations.
Here she breaks new ground with a twist and spin. Where else could stories include jokes about a vibrator and a half-human, half-ibex person? The characters and situations are not the usual. My favorite stories were: "The Lunatics' Eclipse," "Building Girls," "Grace," "A Frame of the Sky," and "The Life, Loves, and Adventures of Zelwa the Halfie."
Her 'A Map of Home' book is another good read. I'd readily read her next book.
December 9, 2016
A stupendous collection of short stories. In all other instances, when works have characters I cannot identify with (many instances in my reviews), I feel less connected with the work, to the point of not seeing the function. In these cases, it is the opposite. I'm drawn in. I learn. I associate not through an empathetic connection to the characters and their trials, but a sympathetic one. And more importantly, I learn from them. I grow. I feel new connections. I don't understand other people in other places in other times in other situations, but I open wider to them and who they are.
January 8, 2017
If 2016 hadn't converted me to appreciating short stories, this book single-handedly would have. I am willing to bet it would have a similar effect on anyone with memories of Egypt, a heart for feminism, an appreciation of stories about women's desires.
Extra bonus points for PhD students who appreciate this line: "I asked her why she was in Egypt, and she told me she was here doing research for her PhD. I wasn't sure how sunning herself on a balcony would get her a doctorate, but I said nothing."
Extra bonus points for PhD students who appreciate this line: "I asked her why she was in Egypt, and she told me she was here doing research for her PhD. I wasn't sure how sunning herself on a balcony would get her a doctorate, but I said nothing."
June 14, 2017
Great book to read! It felt important and timely to read it. A joy at times, at others simply interesting. Backing up; I try to read short story collections occasionally that are outside of my place and culture and so picked this up. On second look and in the first story or two I was not sure how to relate to this. Quickly though I was finding myself quite at home and not at all 'different' than the author or her charactors. The stories kept growing better and better except maybe the last. "Asmahan" and "The Story of my Building" were favorites.
January 8, 2018
I absolutely loved this collection by Randa Jarrar. Read it last year and still think about it often. Feminist, queer, Muslim perspectives with a dash of marvelous weirdness. If you liked Carmen Machado's "Her Body and Other Parties" check out this collection — it's gotten less hype, but I think has somewhat similar sensibilities :) I had the opportunity to hear Jarrar speak at the Muse and the Marketplace conference with Lidia Yuknavitch, and she was absolutely brilliant. Fresh voice and innovative storytelling, all-around great read!!
November 3, 2016
I read this on recommendation from one of my best pals, and then suggested it for my bookclub. Aside from it being rather sexually explicit (which did not bother me, but perhaps I would not have chosen it for a first-round bookclub pick...) the stories are beautiful. I connected to so many of Jarrar's characters and even at their most painful moments, the stories were beautifully written. Highly recommend, especially if you enjoy Arab-American experiences and the female perspective.
November 6, 2017
Strange, prickly, and hilarious. This collection is a bizarre animal weaned on myths and memories, bursting at the seams with the facts and figments of lives pushing against inherited and self-inflicted confines.
Certain images, symbols, and names recur in rotating and multivalvent fashion. The stories lap at each other's borders--waves moving at a shared rhythm.
It's a beautiful, wily pleasure, thanks Ms. Jarrar.
Certain images, symbols, and names recur in rotating and multivalvent fashion. The stories lap at each other's borders--waves moving at a shared rhythm.
It's a beautiful, wily pleasure, thanks Ms. Jarrar.
August 5, 2017
A collection of fictional short stories written by an Arab American woman. Each story is well crafted and provides a unique viewpoint and plot line. I felt like I was opening a little present with each story. Some I wished went on longer but alas, the nature of a short story. Really glad I found this book, a delight.
November 18, 2017
It was nice, I guess. The short stories weren't related, so for a few of them I felt like an ending was missing. I now have to write an essay on two of these, which will be fun, but I think I'm more interested in trying to figure out what each of these is saying about Arab/Arab Americans' character, to write about.
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