My top 14 books of this year, may it serve your ever-growing TBR pile well✌🏽

For BOMB Magazine, I got to write in Tahrir Square about the great @therakha.net upcoming novel The Dissenters (Graywolf), & how the novel ties in with the long lineage of using storytelling as a revolutionary form. Last piece of the year, and hopefully a banger!

bombmagazine.org/articles/202...

Azabekya Garden night book haul before returning to NY in a few days, led by the eternal literary master @therakha.net

New piece about birds and dystopia and noir is out at Passages North, really grateful for this one since it was initially written for a contest about flight, and it ended up making its way here! Hope you read it, and if you see a bird, feed it some crumbs!!

www.passagesnorth.com/passagesnort...

Just did the KGB reading with the peripal crew tonight, first one ever since I came back, and while it was an... interesting night... I did get to debut read the dog story!!!

Imagine my surprise when I got the email that my little dog story was longlisted to the top seven out of 500 subs, eternally grateful to the folks who read my piece for this contest and let it reach this far! And hey, if you want the piece for your pub, it's still up for grabs!!!

Dream come true y'all, one that I held since high-school when I decided to pursue writing. Found the ahwa that Mahfouz and the Harafish would sit and write and talk and smoke and drink in, and I was able to write a bit of the novel in it! But damn did it take me a moment to find!

Genuinely, the novel has been getting stronger and stronger: the characters, the 3 narratives, the setting, the fantastical, the familiar, the unfamiliar, the tones, the sounds, the structure, the voices, the (un)linearity, the past, the present, Brooklyn, Cairo, and everything in between...

Y'all see yb sitting on the carpeted floor here, well decades ago, my folks wedding ceremony was in this very spot, in this very masjid, 24 yrs later, I finally got to visit for the first time. Just bearing witness to the personal and historical in this one space has been so surreal.

The road taken for my night run, primordial sky blues✌🏽

Does a ghost of internet past ever visit you monthly in the brutal depths of night and whisper in your ear... "How's it been?"

Just did the (I believe!) first in person Periplus Collect reading, and it was so fun seeing folks join for this dope lineup of readers! And y'all, full house! Packed to the brim! For folks who I wasn't able to chat or that I missed afterwards, my bad! But feel free to hit me up!

Okay y'all, last go around promoting this, but if you happen to be in the NY/Brooklyn area tomorrow, I'll be reading with some of the dopest writers around (game changers in the making!) at Unnameable books at 7pm! Hope to see y'all there for a night of mingling and verse!

#author #authors