Welcome Farah Ali and Hananah Zaheer in discussing their books, People Want to Live and Lovebirds, moderated by K. K. Fox!
About People Want to Live:
Set primarily in Pakistan, these award-winning stories follow people living on the brink of abandonment - in their personal relationships and their place in the world. A mother, coping with the sudden death of her son, uncovers long buried secrets in his absence. An anguished girl grabs a chance for a life beyond the orphanage walls where she lives and discovers the price of freedom. A young couple tries to keep their fraught relationship steady as a heat wave engulfs their city. A son returns to visit his ageing parents while beset with memories of a troubled childhood. And two thieves find themselves in a situation more precarious by the minute, and more dangerous than their original mission. Farah Ali's debut collection of thirteen stories, People Want to Live features stories of togetherness and reckless faith in the face of a world that's built to break us. Her characters mount battle with loneliness and in their fight reveal surprising vulnerabilities and an astonishing measure of hope.
About Lovebirds:
A grieving mother clutching a dead bird, a jealous lover watching his house burn to the ground, a vision of God in a chicken coop. Through twelve short stories that span the private loneliness of Pakistani bedrooms to the banality of the modern American kitchen, Lovebirds shows love cracking and shattering and exploding. Capturing families on the precipice of unraveling as they reckon with the unspeakable realities of any given Wednesday, Hananah Zaheer surveys the complex fringes of desire, asking What are we willing to lose for one another? Let this book set you on fire. Then revisit and rebuild. It will feel good, like practice.
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Farah Ali is from Karachi, Pakistan. Her work won the 2020 Pushcart Prize and received special mention in the 2018 Pushcart anthology. Her more recent stories can be found in Shenandoah, The Arkansas International, The Southern Review, and Kenyon Review online. Her debut short-story collection, “People Want to Live”, is forthcoming from McSweeney’s in October 2021.
Hananah Zaheer is the author of Lovebirds (Bull City Press, 2021). Other work has appeared in places such as Kenyon Review, Best Small Fictions 2021, Agni, Virginia Quarterly, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, South West Review, Smokelong, among others. Her story “Fish Tank,” at Alaska Quarterly Review, was a notable mention in Best American Short Stories of 2019. “In the Day of Old Things” won the 2018 Lawrence Foundation Literary Prize at Michigan Quarterly Review. She is the founder of Dubai Literary Salon, a prose-reading series, and a fiction editor at Los Angeles Review.
K.K. Fox lives in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has appeared in Iron Horse, Joyland, Kenyon Review Online, Tupelo Quarterly, and other journals and magazines. She is a fiction editor for Los Angeles Review and was recently a semi-finalist for the Story Foundation Prize.
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This event will be held up two flights of stairs. Lost City Books does not have an elevator. Masks are required of attendees. The event will also be simultaneously live streamed on our YouTube page!
People Want to Live and Lovebirds will be available at Lost City Books!