The Cruelest Month
Spring greetings
Dear friends,
Today marks exactly two months since my first—magical—evening in NYC when, nearly a decade after I started playing with the idea of a novel in English, I got to celebrate the publication of The Dissenters with the best possible crowd in the US. The UK edition followed on Feb 27 while I was here slowly succumbing to the wonted grind. With the return of spring, now, I’m thinking it is time to touch base again and let you know I am starting to resume work on the book of essays I am due to publish next year, Postmuslim.
Through parenting and non-literary drudgery, in the last month I have been overwhelmed by Cairo’s Ramadan bedlam and news of the horror and absurdity still unfolding across the border and across the ocean. All this is telling me something I didn’t really know about money and the human heart, I feel. My hope is that Postmuslim will adequately articulate that thing.
Meanwhile I’d like to share the heartening coverage The Dissenters has received against all geopolitical and uncooperative-newspaper-editor odds, noting that you can still contact me or my publishers for a review copy: mentions in LitHub, The Millions, Harper’s Bazaar, and The New Yorker; excerpts in Triple Canopy, Bidoun, The Dial, and Brittle Paper; conversations in The Master’s Review, The Adroit Journal, and Doek; and reviews in The Telegraph, Publishers Weekly, The TLS, The Florida Review, Foreword, Bomb, and Arablit. Two of my US events were recorded here and here; and my Writer’s Bone podcast episode is already out here. Let’s see what the summer brings!
I leave you with this image of Ass’ouss, one of two companions my daughter Kismet sent along with me to America, having a morning moment on the window sill of my Washington DC hotel:
All my love,
Y