Ali Eteraz

His debut novel, Native Believer, is due out via Akashic, on May 3, 2016.

Previously, he wrote the short story collection Falsipedies and Fibsiennes (Guernica Ed. 2014). Other stories have appeared in storySouth, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Forge Journal. In 2014, his story, Iron Bowl, was long-listed for The Million Writers Award.

Eteraz is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir CHILDREN OF DUST (HarperCollins, 2009). It was selected as a New Statesman Book of the Year and was featured on PBS with Tavis Smiley, NPR with Terry Gross, C-SPAN2, and numerous international outlets. O, The Oprah Magazine, called it "a picaresque journey" and the book was long-listed for the Asian American Writer's Workshop Award.

Published in September, 2014, via Guernica Editions. Now available online and at bookstores.

Ranging from the Persian Gulf to the American South, from ancient Greece to pre-Islamic Arabia, Ali Eteraz's stories observe an eccentric cast of characters longing for freedom. Illicit lovers playing with Koranic numerology; an enslaved man turned into a beast; a young woman rejecting her father's faith; theologically inclined brothers caught in a dragnet; a resentful poet's cynical humanitarianism. Sensual and surrealist, the stories in Falsipedies and Fibsiennes unsettle and surprise, but with tenderness.

The title of the collection is inspired by the "Gymnopedies and Gnossiennes" of the early 20th century Dadaist composer Erik Satie. These were made-up words Satie used to refer to a new type of music.

Table of Contents

The Woman in the Scorpion Abaya

A Lawyer in Islamistan

A Beautiful Woman

Honey

The Invasion of Mecca

The Monster

The Art of Becoming Snow

The Art of Becoming a Jinn

Volkodlak

The Conversion of Hajj Abdul Rahim al-Biloxi

The Hunter of Virgins

Tyranny

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Reviews

"I found this book immensely readable because of Eteraz’s control of language and lightness. He brought the dusty and sanitized world of the Persian Gulf into exquisite focus with the same breath that he could describe a warring faction in Ancient Arabia, or a Polish diner on Coney Island. But what kept me on the edge of my seat was his weaving together of his different inspirations to create a collection that is unlike anything that’s out there.

Sure, Eteraz is tipping his hat to Salman Rushdie’s humorous explorations of Islam, but his range goes beyond Rushdie’s bombastic style and reminds me of Karen Russell’s short stories, bringing together fantastical elements with the everyday urges and relationships of men and women. (Also, the Pakistani American stories brought to mind one of my favorite post-9.11 South Asian novels, Home Boy by H.M. Naqvi).

I thought the collection experimented well through different genres, with dips into historical fiction (the long story “The Battle for Mecca”), crime fiction (focusing on the brilliant, dying fixer/private detective of the Gulf, Auntie, in “A Beautiful Woman”), mythology (embodying the Minotaur in “The Monster”), and even supernatural/erotica in “Volkodlok.”

My favorite parts of the book were the stories that focused on labor, love, and wealth in Bahrain and other Gulf countries — where Eteraz uses his language to bring to life the setting, and also tries to expose certain truths about gender and labor. The opening story “The Woman in the Scorpion Abaya” is my favorite story of the collection, and worth buying the whole collection — both for its description of expat life in Bahrain, the eroticism of an illicit affair, and especially how everything is flipped at the end so that the story becomes a statement on the treatment of South Asian workers in this region."

Continue reading review at The Aerogram…

Praise for the Collection

"Barry Hannah said that great fiction ‘Takes Us There.’ When you read Ali Eteraz’s brave, wonderful stories, you are transported by strength of detail, diction and image to a landscape that is at once both strange and familiar, fabulist and realist. The effect is that of being simultaneously on an island, in a desert, in gridlock traffic on a sandstorm-battered highway. You want to see how Eteraz imagines and re-imagines the worlds we live in now, and the worlds we’ve experienced in our dreams, in our pasts. If you like stories that challenge and delight, this is your book." — Elizabeth Kadetsky, author of THE POISON THAT PURIFIES YOU (Paul Bowles Prize Winner at C&R Press) and FIRST THERE IS A MOUNTAIN (Little Brown).

Praise for Select Stories

VOLKODLAK

"I have read Volkodlak several times…it’s fascinating and sensual, and a great exploration of ‘humanity’ in all senses of the word." — Alissa Nutting, Managing Editor of Fairy Tale Review and author of TAMPA (Ecco).

THE HUNTER OF VIRGINS

"It is the easiest thing in the world to write a story that poses no challenges, that follows the expected contours of narration. Modernists broke away from those conventions, and now, in a revived age of capitalist realism, we need new ways around the canonical formations. In “Hunter of Virgins”—a story of repressed sexuality taken to bizarre extremes: we may call it contemporary Arab Gothic—Eteraz constantly contravenes established discourses about gender, class, and social norms in Kuwaiti society, each time challenging us to rethink our own collaboration in these practices. There is a technically astute way to subvert expectations and a clumsier way, and what Eteraz does is to exploit the techniques of buildup, suspense, and thwarted plot development to take us in a wholly surprising direction from where the story starts out, a surprise that can then be read back to the beginning to lend retrospective urgency to what was calculatedly presented as meandering and hesitant. This is a very artful story that refuses to take the reader by the hand and comfort him, and displays the narrator’s resilient confidence in stopping and going, as though taking a dispassionate overview of the realist fictional landscape and suggesting many contingent ways of looking through it. Having long been an admirer of Eteraz’s writing, I am very gratified to witness his maturity as a fiction writer; I feel like he has big surprises up his sleeve and I look forward to being further enchanted." -- Anis Shivani, National Book Critics Circle, author of THE FIFTH LASH AND OTHER STORIES (C&R Press) and ANATOLIA AND OTHER STORIES (Black Lawrence Press).

A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN

"This story is gorgeous. Its like something out of DUBLINERS, except in the Middle East. Really beautiful." -- Elizabeth McKenzie, author of STOP THE GIRL (Random House), short-listed for the Story Prize.

"Why does what we look like matter so much? Why do we seem more motivated to fix others versus ourselves? Why do we often have so little say over our own lives? These are just some of the quandaries explored in Ali Eteraz’s story, “A Beautiful Woman.” Set in Abu Dhabi and crackling with strangeness, “A Beautiful Woman” drops us into a chaotic, dangerous, and unjust microcosm with Samia at its center, a heretofore marginalized maid whose preferred mode of transportation is a miniature, motorized trike and whom hecklers have dubbed the Bandit Queen. With true empathy, I will remember Samia less as the Bandit Queen, however much I like that image and title, and more as the overlooked woman who, “in the recessed parts of her, where vestiges of femininity were still strong, she felt anguish.” — Ethel Rohan, author of OUT OF DUBLIN (Shebooks) & GOODNIGHT NOBODY (Queen’s Ferry Press), a Story Prize Notable Book.

THE WOMAN IN THE SCORPION ABAYA

THE WOMAN IN THE SCORPION ABAYA An excerpt from lead story in the collection, set in Bahrain, about a surrealist American painter, love, and Koranic numerology. Neelanjana Banerjee of the LA Review of Books called the story "flawless and brilliant" and "worth buying the entire collection for."

A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN An excerpt from the astonishing story of a maid-cum-private-detective in Abu Dhabi. The acclaimed author of Stop the Girl (Random House) and finalist for the Story Prize, Elizabeth McKenzie, described it as "Gorgeous! Something out of Dubliners, except in the Middle East."

HONEY An excerpt from the much beloved story about a bed-ridden boy in Alabama and his weird family. Originally published in Digital Americana Spring 2013.