Randa Jarrar

Praise for Randa Jarrar:

“Jarrar does what every brave storyteller 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 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

“Randa Jarrar’s prose is bold and luscious and makes the darkly comic seem light.  The voices in Him, Me, Muhammed 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 Loving Day

“Wow! 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

“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, Muhammad Ali astonishes from start to finish.” – Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask

About 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 astrayseeking 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.